OS X Tip #103
If you received a winmail.dat or application/ms-tnef attachment from a Windows using friend. They claim it is a Word file, you have Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice) on your Mac, but you can not open this winmail.dat or application/ms-tnef file. Confused?

What is this?
Sometimes when someone uses Outlook for Windows that is sent through Windows Exchange Server a winmail.dat or a MIME attachment with the type “application/ms-tnef” is created when they send the email message in Rich Text File (RTF). This attachment actually does contain the contents your friend created and some encoding data. So this is not your Mac’s fault. Luckily, all is not lost, this is easy to convert to something you can open and use.

Here’s how:
Download TNEF’s Enough, freeware, OS X and OS 9. This allows Macs to read and extract files from Microsoft TNEF stream files.

If this happens often, you can ask your Windows friend to just turn off Rich Text File (RTF) in Outlook for Windows. This is quite simple. Tools Options -> Mail Format -> Plain text. This saves you the time of converting them.

    | Tags: attachments, convert, email, mac tips, outlook, winmail.dat