[KLUG Members] winmail.dat and tnef

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Received an email attachment today called winmail.dat.  It had two
> attachments in it.  

This is pretty normal.  Winmail comes from outlook and is related to the
old-fashioned M$-Mail and early versions of Exchange which were really
just a bunch of DCE processing buckets.  (I have no idea what the
internals of a current-ish version of Exchange look like - but they've
been described to me by people who would know as using the "garbage
dump" strategy of message handling - and supposedly still use DCE
encoding).

> Apparently MS has Outlook merge attachments together in its own format,
> assuming the rest of the world uses Outlook too.  Anybody surprised?

You can disable sending of tnef via an Outlook preference, where depends
on the version.

> Googling around I found a program called tnef
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tnef/) that seems to have opened it up
> pretty well (Open Office could upen the MS-Word doc and a CSV file
> without problem).

And there is an Evolution plugin at
http://www.users.on.net/~notzed/src/tnef-plugin-0.0.0.tar.gz 

This is supposed to be built into Evolution at some point (might be
already, I don't know).

> I always ignored winmail.dat files before.  Anybody else have other
> suggestions, recommendations, on dealing with winmail.dat files?
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