Recently, I got an e-mail from a seriously distressed reader. She said, "Sometimes I’ll receive email attachments that the sender swears she sent as a .doc or .gif attachment, and by the time I get it, the attachment has turned itself into an ugly winmail.dat file and can’t be opened. What’s happening? I’ve Googled myself into a sobbing, sorry geek."
Sadly, her e-mail address bounced my reply back twice, so I gave up. But since I worry she may still be sobbing in Sagle, I’m going to include my reply here as well. (Maybe she gets the local paper or subscribes to Logical Tips.)
In any case, the winmail.dat thing was not new news for me. I actually had the same problem with attachments for a while and it was hugely annoying. It turned out to be caused by a conflict between my e-mail program and my firewall. I had the freebie Zone Alarm firewall and I use a somewhat obscure program called Courier for e-mail. (As an aside, in my opinion, using an obscure e-mail program is one of the best way to avoid viruses.)
In any case, in the short-term, you can save the attachment with the unhelpful winmail.dat name to your hard disk. Then rename the winmail.dat file to whatever filename the person said it was. The attachment should open fine. Be sure to include the three-letter file extension, such as .doc, .pdf, .gif or whatever, so your computer knows what type of file it is. Of course, it’s an enormous pain to do all this renaming if you transfer a lot of files. And, unfortunately, sometimes people don’t know what type of file they sent.
After a while, I did find a solution. I ditched Zone Alarm as my firewall. I use a different free firewall called Sygate now, which I like better anyway. You can get it here: http://smb.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm. Since I switched, I’ve had no more problems with attachments.
NOTE: Six months after I wrote this, I switched e-mail programs along with the firewall. When I get winmail.dat files, they need to be decoded. I can’t just rename the file.
The problem happens when people send files from Microsoft Outlook in “Rich Text format” instead of “Plain text” format. Sometimes the attachment comes in as a winmail.dat file. In any case, the problem is described in more detail here:
http://www.pchell.com/support/winmaildat.shtml.
You can get a free decoder program from this page:
http://www.biblet.freeserve.co.uk/.
After you’ve decoded a few files, you’ll undoubtedly want to tell your Outlook-using friends to read and heed the article’s instructions for sending files you can read 😉