[ILUG] Solution - MS-TNEF WINMAIL.DAT Attachments and LINUX

[bimal pandit]

MS-TNEF WINMAIL.DAT Attachments and LINUX
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Dear All,

Today(19/09/05) I received a mail from a user with a call that he has received a mail and is unable to open it in linux, the mail has "winmail.dat" as attachement, I googled and found the following useful sites and solution...


ABOUT WINMAIL
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Mail programs in the Microsoft Exchange family, which includes Windows Messaging, Outlook97, Outlook98 and Outlook2000+, will include a TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format) attachment named WINMAIL.DAT when the sender selects, or defaults to, RTF (Rich Text Format). If the sender is using MIME formatting, this attachment will have Content-Type: application/ms-tnef.

The TNEF attachment includes a Rich Text Format (e.g. bold, underline, fonts) version of the plain text message. If the sender has included any attachments (e.g. pictures, spreadsheets, programs), they will be embedded within the TNEF attachment and not as separate attachments.

Most other mail programs do not know how to handle the TNEF attachments and so Exchange family users should avoid using RTF unless they know that the recipient has a compatible program. The sender can control the use of RTF on a recipient by recipient basis. However, if sending via a Microsoft Exchange server, the server can override the sender's settings. In this case the Exchange administrator will need to make changes on the server.

For more information on this, see the following articles:-
-How Message Formats Affect Internet Mail, HOWTO: Force a Particular Internet Encoding by Using MAPI with Exchange,

-XCLN: Sending Messages In Rich-Text Format,

-XFOR: Preventing WINMAIL.DAT Sent to Internet Users, Sending RTF with Attachment as MIME Loses Attachment,

-XADM: POP3 Users may not Receive an Attachment if Part of DL,

-XFOR: CR Receives Rich Text Format Information Unexpectedly, Winmail.dat attachments are included in received e-mail messages in Outlook 2002 or 2003 .

after going through all these, the solution I found is... 

SOLUTION
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-save the winmail.dat attachement in some directory, for e.g. I am taking here "/home/bimal/test" as my directory, I saved "winmail.dat" file over here.

-installed a package "tnef-1.3.3-1.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm" on my Fedora Core 3

-enter into the "test" directory and did 

	[bimal at bimalserver test]$ tnef  winmail.dat

this will create a file "Document.pdf" in the same directory, now use some pdf reader/viewer to see/print the content. 

I used acroread, kpdf and GNOME pdf viewer but unfortunately xpdf did'nt worked for me!!

that's all is required, for further info do "man tnef".

hope that this will help a few people.

regards,

Bimal Pandit

NOTE:-
1) My system is Fedora Core 3, check these packages as per your OS/flavour/version.
2) http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/decode.htm
3) http://www.ust.hk/itsc/email/tips/tnef/