WTF is winmail.dat

[Lord Snooty]

Sometimes when I email Word or PDF docs to friends they receive an email with a winmail.dat file instead. What is this and what causes it to happen?

 

[jailon]

When you send mail to the Internet from an Exchange Windows or Outlook client, a file attachment called Winmail.dat may be automatically added to the end of the message if the recipient's client cannot receive messages in Rich Text Format (RTF). The Winmail.dat file contains Exchange Server RTF information for the message, and may appear to the recipient as a binary file.

to resolve, go here
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138053

 

[stolzy]

Or to put it another way, Outlook can't do email attachments properly - it assumes that the only possible recipient mail application is Outlook.