Unreadable attachments named Winmail.dat

TIP OF THE DAY

Unreadable attachments named Winmail.dat

This tip is for those of us who do not use Microsoft Outlook as our email reader.  If you sometimes receive emails with an attachment named "winmail.dat" that you email program cannot open, here is the solution:

These are Outlook specific attachments that cannot be read by other programs. The only way to solve this is to ask the senders to turn off "Send in Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format" in their Outlook settings and use HTML or Plain Text instead. Some users and companies refuse to do that because "Everybody uses Outlook anyway."

See the following MS knowledgebase article for instructions:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q241/5/38.ASP&NoWebContent=1