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.<\/p>\n
Even using strings<\/a>, 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!<\/p>\n Turns out that Microsoft Outlook uses winmail.dat to preserve formatting information when sending HTML or Rich Text emails. We all use Lotus Notes<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n