'hidden' mail attachments and winmail.dat

[kerm1t]

One of my users is experiencing problems recieving emails with attachments in them.

He asked a friend to send a mail with a PDF attached to his mail account on my box, and a duplicate message to the mail account provided by his ISP.

He fetched both messages over POP, but the message sent via my server claimed to have only one attachment - winmail.dat. He used WM Viewer to view it, and got this message:

"If you use Microsoft Outlook Express and receive a message from an Outlook
user which should have an attachment but appears to be missing then it may
be still there. Follow this procedure: In Outlook Express, select the mail
in the main list window, then click menu 'File','Properties', in the dialog,
click 'Details', in the next dialog click 'Message Source', right-click
'Select All', then open Notepad and save as a file WINMAIL.MIM . Then open
up WinZip - or another MIME decoder - choose menu 'open' and select the
WINMAIL.MIM file and extract the file 'winmail.dat' into a folder and then
open it by WMViewer."


I stay away from MS, so I didn't know what winmail.dat was until today. What's puzzling me is why there was a problem sending via my server, but not via his ISP

Any thoughts please?

 

[InnerChild]

I would look into what software is being used to send the inital message. We were having problems with the same sort of thing when our MAC developers were getting these weird attachments. After a little Googleing I was finding articles on when Outlook sends out a email and packages itself up into winmail.dat file and then gets sent off.

If your cleint is using a MAC and being sent attachments or emails from Outlook users that could be the problem there.

IC

 

[kerm1t]

Thanks for your reply. He's using Outlook Express (I'm guessing an old version, as from what I've read winmail.dat isn't used much now).

My BOFH side would like to see him suffer for using OE and not turning the winmail.dat **** off, but I think that's probably excessively cruel. I'm just puzzled why the message becomes mangled when it passes through my server, but not when he sends it via his ISP.