Opening Winmail.dat files on a Mac
Sunday, May 31st, 2009One fairly persistent issue I have is some people I know insist on sending me emails from Windows mail (apparently Outlook is the worst offender) with the ‘Use Windows mail format’ option checked. This anti-social behaviour results in non-Windows users receiving attachments packaged up into a file called winmail.dat which they can’t open. Apparently this is just a wrapper around standard attachments that could be handled ok but MS prefer to use their own ’standards’ instead. Sometimes you can ask the mail sender to send the message in a standard format, but this is not always possible. I have done a little investigation and have discovered a few ways to deal with the problem.
Firstly, the OSX Mail app has an option to try viewing messages as alternate types – the option is under View|Message|Next Alternative option. This often manages to decode an attachment into plain text. If this fails there is a free application called Enough that you can drop the winmail.dat file onto and it seems to do a pretty good job of extracting the attachments from it. And finally there is a plug-in for Mail called Letter Opener which is expensive but handles the conversion inside Mail and make the attachments appear where they should be in the message. I’m guessing it’s expensive because it does a bunch of other things too – calendar conversion for one. It looks like it would be fairly to implement the attachment processing functionality on its own – I’m adding it to my to-do list of things to do on a quiet evening sometime.