Winmail.dat attachments

RT Users
1

Hey,

Does anyone know why certain attachments (only seeing this from Outlook
users) show up as “winmail.dat” through RT?

If you download it, it does have the attachment in there, but its also
full of MS “crap”, which I presume is some sort of extensions Outlook
adds to the attachment which RT doesn’t understand.

Outlook Express doesn’t seem to be able to see it either, so I’m not
blaming RT, but for example Yahoo! Mail can read the attachment.

Any ideas what can be done? RT seems to be doing the right thing, and
the raw message does show winmail.dat is the attachment - but we can’t
exactly tell a customer to stop using Outlook.

Even if someone just says its Outlook doing it I’ll be happy, since
they’re blaming us at the moment.

Cheers,
Andy.

2

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.

Good Luck!

Verlin Henderson
ONLINE Information Services

3

Andy Coates wrote:

Does anyone know why certain attachments (only seeing this from Outlook
users) show up as “winmail.dat” through RT?

It’s an Outlook attachment containing formatting info for the
message–you can safely ignore it.

pg

4

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.

Microsoft Support

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@snapgear.com Ph: +61 7 3435 2810 Fx: +61 7 3891 3630
SnapGear - Custom Embedded Solutions and Security Appliances

5

We are still using rt 1 (for performance reasons,
we have > 300000 tickets) with stripmime
and we strip winmail.dat and smime.p7s attachments from the body.

this is our regex to handle the attachments in the body:
lib/ui/web/support.pm:

 print "<pre>";
 $body = convert_html($body);
 # fix spaces in stripmime urls
 $body =~ s{\n(http://rt\.\S+/stripmime/[^ ]*) ([^ ]*)\n}
       {\n$1%20$2\n}g;
 # ignore smime.p7s and winmail.dat
 $body =~ s{(http://rt\.\S+/stripmime/.*/winmail.dat)}
           {<font color="grey">$1</font>}g;
 $body =~ s{(http://rt\.\S+/stripmime/.*/smime.p7s)}
           {<font color="grey">$1</font>}g;
 $body =~ s{(http|https|ftp)(://\S+)}
           {<a target="_new" href="$1$2">$1$2</a>}gs;
 $body =~ s{(mailto:\S+)} {<a href="$1">$1</a>}gs;
 print $body;
 print "</pre>";

Paul Goracke schrieb:

Andy Coates wrote:

Does anyone know why certain attachments (only seeing this from Outlook
users) show up as “winmail.dat” through RT?

It’s an Outlook attachment containing formatting info for the
message–you can safely ignore it.

Microsoft Support

pg

rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Have you read the FAQ? The RT FAQ Manager lives at http://fsck.com/rtfm

Reini Urban - Programmer - http://inode.at