I work in a technical service role – which normally involves customers emailing some error messages, trace or logs to us for analysis. Had a bit of problem with this today, as every file the customer sent – no matter what it was or how many they had included – ended up arriving in a single attachment called winmail.dat that we couldn’t seem to open.
Even using strings, the files still looked pretty mixed-up, but I could see that the one thing that they all had in common was that they all contained “IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note” fairly early on in the file. A Google for this showed that I’ve not been the first to come across this!
Turns out that Microsoft Outlook uses winmail.dat to preserve formatting information when sending HTML or Rich Text emails. We all use Lotus Notes at work (and that’s after a mail server script has had a go at incoming emails to scan attachments and file them somewhere safe). So, we couldn’t read attachments wrapped in the proprietary Outlook junk.
I found a bunch of different utilities claiming to extract attachments for you, but the one that seemed to do it quickest and easiest was WMDecode.
Good use of 5 minutes before I even got to look at the customer’s problem(!) Sadly, the problem described in the log files took slightly longer to figure out, but that’s another story 🙂