[rt-users] Winmail.dat attachments

[Phil Homewood]

Verlin Henderson wrote:
> Outlook *is* doing it - you need to change the way Outlook
> sends mail from Microsoft Outlook Rich Text to plain text
> or HTML. You can do this from Tools menu by clicking on 
> Options, then clicking on the Mail Format tab.

Correct.

Paul Goracke said:
> It's an Outlook attachment containing formatting info for the
> message--you can safely ignore it.

Not quite. If a message containing an attachment is sent in
Microsoft Rich Text (*spit*) format, it'll also be embedded in
the winmail.dat file. Yuk.

There exist Unix tools to parse these stupid attachments. A
command line one is "tnef", and there's also a Perl module,
Convert::TNEF (Debian package libconvert-tnef-perl, FreeBSD
port converters/p4-Convert-TNEF), which might be able to be
shoehorned into rt-mailgate.

> http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q241538&  

Note in particular the following text from that page:-

: In addition to the information listed above, the path to your personal
: folders file (PST) file and your logon name are embedded in the
: winmail.dat file. Although this data is not explicitly exposed to the
: recipient, if the recipient opens the winmail.dat file for editing in
: a binary or text editor, he can see the path and logon name.

Nice, huh?
-- 
Phil Homewood, Systems Janitor, www.SnapGear.com
pdh at snapgear.com Ph: +61 7 3435 2810 Fx: +61 7 3891 3630
SnapGear - Custom Embedded Solutions and Security Appliances