Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Winmail.dat

Anyone who's had a mac for a while will probably have received a "winmail.dat" attachment in their email. While there are free tools like TNEF's enough its a bit painful to use. There are commerical plug ins for Apple mail but they cost money. Another interesting point is neither of these apps worked under Leopard for me. Since all my mail goes through google, I went to the gmail interface and found a mail item with a winmail.dat attachment and sure enough gmail handles these the correct way and shows me the attachments. If Google's gmail can do it why can't Apple fix this in mail?

Anyway the free and easy fix if you pipe your mail through gmail and get a winmail.dat attachment is go to the gmail interface and get the attachments that way.

2 comments:

Wacko said...

I click on my winmail.dat and it asks for a program to open them in. What happens when you click them?

Rob said...

Have you tried looking at the email/attachment in gmail? I found thats one way to see it. Otherwise you download it and drop it on TNEF's enough. Some winmail.dat files contain nothing useful though.