Winmail.dat attachments

Letter Opener Pro works perfect. It is an extension that runs in Mail and seamlessly allows you to open all attachments like this. It costs a little bit, but completely solves the problem in a transparent way.

Thanks Strawj I will try it. Wtms we are talking at cross purposes- by client I mean the organizations who contract me to do work for them not the computer server client. It may well be microsoft's or apple's "fault" but it's my problem and all I need is a tool that will assist me in earning a living and not cause endless aggravation- and the iPad is now doing just that (pages isn't anywhere near stable enough). My clients (ie the people who pay me to do work for them) won't change their system's settings as they don't see any problem except me being a pain and will find someone less high maintenance to do the work for them! I need a business machine- now there's a name for a company!

So I've signed up for the free version- to see if it will work. I am now taken into the free version, which doesn't allow me to open the file without buying the pro version. I don't mind doing that but I want to check that it will work first.

This is another frustration with apple's systems in this case the App Store. Before now I've ended up buying the same app three times because it is not obvious to me that it has been successfully bought- I was given a refund but with a comment that this isn't normally done and in future I needed to be more careful. Now I don't know whether an app will work and so I'm left with the dilemma of paying for the full version on spec with perhaps no prospect of a refund if it doesn't work as apple say they take no responsibility for 3rd party apps- despite it being on their "official" sales website. It may be only £2.49 but it's the principle at stake.

Once again I am wasting time trying to resolve what should be a simple matter rather than getting on with my work. I am now seriously beginning to regret moving from Microsoft to Apple.

Strawj I did purchase the pro version and it works. I then had to buy the unzip element for zipped files- and it works too!

Thanks for the advice- clear and concise.

See this was your app Catlan. It's working very well as I said to Strawj

Thanks wtms - I'm forwarding your response to my IT guy and hope that he can figure out what needs to be done. As other posters have commented, it's not an option to inform our clients that they need to buy a program in order to open our attachments when Adobe used to work fine a month ago. As I mentioned before I have no tech knowledge so I hope these next questions aren't completly off the wall. When I send the exact same email to 3 different people and 2 out of 3 receive the attachment as a pdf and the other receives it as a winmail.dat, is that still something to do with the server settings being overridden? And, are you refering to my server settings or my client's server settings?

Thanks.

According to my IT Administrator our server default is set to HTML.

So my IT guy did some testing and determined that at least one problem lies somewhere with sending these attachments to an iPhone with a Gmail account. The tests that we did were sending an invoice in pdf format out of my accounting system to an iPhone and an Android, both with Gmail accounts. The iPhone converted the attachment to winmail.dat and the Android received the attachment as a pdf. We also tried sending the same email to an iPhone and an Android with a hotmail account and the attachment was fine with both.

That is a very interesting result. I found this article on Outlook and winmail.dat that points out that you may need to clear Outlook's autocomplete-cache as well as changing the mail type to plain text or HTML to get it to stop sending winmail.dat files to certain addresses:

http://www.slipstick.com/problems/outlook-is-sending-winmail-dat-attachments

Show it to your IT guy and see if that's what may be happening. E.g. the iPhone Gmail acct is one you've been sending stuff to for a while and it used to be set to send as RTF, was changed to HTML/plain text at some point but autocomplete-cache is still saying RTF and overriding the new setting, whereas the Android Gmail account is new and has always been set to send in non-RTF format and so does not have the problem.

(There is an additional possibility -- we know web-based Gmail automatically extracts content from winmail.dat attachments in incoming mails. Perhaps the Android Gmail app does this too? So it may be that the emails to the Android phone acct are actually being sent with winmail.dat attachments from your Outlook/Exchange acct but they are being automatically removed by the Android Gmail app so you never see them. If you're really keen then try using another email client for reading the mails at that Gmail account - preferably a Mac or Windows PC running a non-MS email client like Thunderbird or whatever. Does that get winmail.dat attachments or not?)

As I this is all fascinating stuff, but the point surely is to stop having to worry about winmail.dat files? (i.e. to drain the swamp).

Even if you manage to stop the emails you send from your Outlook/Exchange acct to your Gmail/iPhone from using winmail.dat attachments there's no way to prevent other users from other organisations sending you such emails at any time in the future. So why not just install one of the winmail.dat handler apps from the app store and rest easy? Why muck about endlessly trying to figure out whether it's some obscure setting in Outlook and/or Exchange or some weird interaction between Gmail and Exchange that is causing them in this particular case?

With a winmail.dat app installed on your iPhone or iPad you don't care who sends winmail.dat attachments to you or why, you never have to worry about winmail.dat again.

Clearing Outlook's 'auto complete' cache worked for me 🙂

i have seen that if you are using gmail that if u download the free gmail app that the attachments come through just fine

I think I may need to clarify why I have the need to resolve this issue. I send invoices to my customers via email instead of snail mail. So it is my customers who are having problems opeing their invoice, not me. If it were as simple as me installing an app I would do it in a heart beat but it's my customers who are suffering with this.

I did have one customer who couldn't open his attachment on his iPhone so I sent the email to a different gmail account which was on his Windows PC and the attachment showed up as a pdf.

Thank you though for your response. My IT guy has been out of the office for a few days but I will definetly show him the article you suggested and your response.

Clearing Outlook's 'auto complete' cache worked for me too! (Which means that it IS caused by some MS update or another.)

Here's the fix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287623

Ah, I see. Well in that case good luck with becoming an expert in the ways of Outlook & Exchange. Best guess is if you've eliminated the other settings in Outlook and Exchange that can cause RTF emails to be sent then it's probably the auto-complete cache, that seems to have corrected the issue for others.

PLease help. I have sent from my Outlook a jpeg attachment to my & my husband's email.

On my ipad, it is received as winmail.dat, he can easily open it as a jpeg.

The email from my outlook has been sent as html (so this has NOT been sent in rtf)...

So where is the problem? Before Christmas it was ok, now I am receiving winmail.dat only

THank you very much for your assistance!!!