Emails from Outlook come through as winmail.dat??

[shandypants]

Hi
Does anyone know why PDF files sent from a PC user running Outlook are arriving to some OSX users as a winmail.dat file? The users in question are running Entourage rather than Mail which seems to be the cause? The same email forwarded to another PC user and to an OSX Mail user arrives as a PDF perfectly.

Any ideas what Entourage is doing to the email, and resolutions to this?

Cheers

Shandy

 

[Pinju]

I'm not entire sure about your exact 'environment' but in my experience the client is choosing to receive mail in text format (or NOT html.)

 

[marlowdrummer]

Pulled this from the Outllok help file

If recipients of your messages receive an attachment called winmail.dat, you sent messages to them that included Microsoft Exchange Rich Text formatting, such as bold or italic text, but the recipients do not use an e-mail program that can read this format.

To select a message format do the following:

On the Tools menu, click Options.
On the Mail Format tab, under Message format, in the Compose in this message format list, click HTML or Plain Text.


HTH
Marlowdrummer

 

[cateswalters]

marlowdrummer is correct - get them to resend as anything but RTF (Rich Text Format) and is will be fine. There are also utils to convert winmail.dat to the original file if resending is not an option.

 

[ancientgeek]

In my experience, MS-software users are imperialists who don't acknowledge us colonial serfs. How delightful that this time it's the MS-software users who are being skewered by the MS-proprietary format!

The problem is not specifically with Rich Text, but with the fact that Microsoft Exchange Server turns Rich Text emails into Rich Text wrapped in a proprietary TNEF email attachment in the case that it thinks the recipient is compatible with proprietary MAPI TNEF wrappers around attachments. Microsoft Mail programs silently unwrap the attachment and show it as the original email again. Except Entourage apparently.

Just keep a copy of TNEF's Enough on your Mac, and quietly jump through this little hoop every now and then for the rude imperialists.

It may be possible to update your Entourage version, or the senders address book entries for the recipient, to prevent the TNEF wrapper happening.