entrop88203

Q: Why do Excel attachments from some people show up as winmail.dat and what can be done to fix it?

Why do Excel attachments from some people always show up as windmail.dat and what can be done to fix it?

MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2011), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Feb 20, 2015 2:35 PM

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Q: Why do Excel attachments from some people show up as winmail.dat and what can be done to fix it?

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  • by sterling r,

    sterling r sterling r Feb 22, 2015 7:42 AM in response to entrop88203
    Community Specialists
    Feb 22, 2015 7:42 AM in response to entrop88203

    Hey there entrop88203,

     

    It sounds like not all emails you get have the winmail.dat attachment you are talking about, so it seems to me that those senders would have to change a setting. I found more information about this attachment in the following article for you:

     

    If you get an email message with a winmail.dat attachment on your Mac

    If you receive an email message sent from a Microsoft email app such as Outlook or Microsoft Exchange, the message might include an attachment with "winmail.dat" in the name. The attachment doesn't appear in the Microsoft email app, but it does appear in Mail, and in other apps it may appear as a MIME section named "application/ms-tnef."

     

    This occurs when the sender composed a message that includes additional information about text attributes such as font, color, boldfacing, or underlining. To avoid seeing these attachments in the future, ask the sender to turn off the option in their email app to send the message in Microsoft rich text format. More information is available in Microsoft's description of the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF).

     

    Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

    Cheers,

    Sterling