Thunderbird and winmail.dat Attachments
At work, we use IMAP for our email service. This is great because I can get my email no matter where I’ve logged in, but Outlook doesn’t play nice with IMAP (probably because Microsoft wants us to use an Exchange server). So, I use Mozilla Thunderbird (or Thunderchicken as a friend of mine says).
Thunderbird is the best IMAP client that I’ve ever used, but like most email clients, it occasionally has problems with attachments sent from Outlook users. Outlook has a tendency to send attachments in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). So, if you’ve ever seen a winmail.dat attachment, this is why.
Fortunately for Thunderbird users, there’s an extension called LookOut that allows you to open files inside the winmail.dat attachment.
Crisis averted.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Cool! We often run into the winmail.dat problem with some of the stuff we do at work. This might come in handy! If I wasn’t busy fighting with Outlook at the moment, I’d give a good rant on all the reason’s Outlook sucks, but perhaps that will be for another day!