Receiving Win.dat attachments in Mail

[HelveticaNeue]

For the last two years, whenever a certain person sends our office a PDF it arrives as a winmail.dat file. I assume it was a problem with his settings and just use TNEF to open them. His attachments are always winmail.dat on both iMacs in our office.

This week we bought a third Mac for someone new in the office and the PDF attachments from the same person show up properly on the new mac. Even when all three Macs are CC on the same message, the two older Macs get winmail.dat files and the new one gets a perfect PDF.

Any ideas?

 

[r0k]

For the last two years, whenever a certain person sends our office a PDF it arrives as a winmail.dat file. I assume it was a problem with his settings and just use TNEF to open them. His attachments are always winmail.dat on both iMacs in our office.

This week we bought a third Mac for someone new in the office and the PDF attachments from the same person show up properly on the new mac. Even when all three Macs are CC on the same message, the two older Macs get winmail.dat files and the new one gets a perfect PDF.

Any ideas?

What OS are on these Macs? The most obvious explanation would be a newer OS (along with a newer mail.app) on the newer Mac.

 

[50548]

http://email.about.com/od/outlookti...at_Attachments_from_Being_Sent_in_Outlook.htm

 

[HelveticaNeue]

What OS are on these Macs? The most obvious explanation would be a newer OS (along with a newer mail.app) on the newer Mac.

Mountain Lion 10.8.1 on all three.

 

[mactmaster]

Unfortunately, this is a problem from the senders side. The link link above shows steps on how to prevent the problem by changing preferences on the senders outlook but you don't want to keep telling people to change their settings each time you get winmail.dat from a new person so it's easier to patch the problem on your end.

Look into http://www.creativeinaustria.com/LetterOpenerPro

Regarding the newer Mac not getting winmail.dat, do they all share the same email account or does each one have it's own separate email? The setting that causes winmail.dat is sometimes set at the contact level which means some contacts will get them and others won't.

 

[HelveticaNeue]

Unfortunately, this is a problem from the senders side.

Thanks. Each user has a separate email address. I read through the link above, but unfortunately the sender isn't using Outlook but Windows Live Mail (Windows 7) and all the instructions I can find to change individual address settings seem targeted for some version of Outlook. The person isn't tech savvy, so I don't want to send them instructions that are not specific to the program they are using.

I will keep looking for dedicated Windows Live Mail instructions. Thanks to everyone for help in confirming this is still a sender issue.

 

[mactmaster]

The winmail.dat file is created when sending RTF formatted emails. Windows Live Mail supposedly supports only HTML and plain text email which should shouldn't have a problem. Make sure they are on the latest version of Windows Live Mail. Again, I also recommend you take care of it on your end so you don't have to rely on others settings to be right.