If you can’t convince the sender to use standard email formats, you also have a few options for reading these Winmail.dat-formatted messages. On the Mac, TNEF’s Enough, can open winmail.dat files.

I was confused by your answer regarding winmail.dat. The file cannot be opened traditionally, at least to obtain what the receiver believes to be valuable contents. Rather, it's used internally by ...

We keep getting e-mail attachments in winmail.dat files, and can't open them. What's going on? Is there a utility that can extract the attachments from these?

There is software that will open such files — just search for Winmail.dat decoder. And you can open them in Microsoft Word. But you’ll see only a bunch of gibberish.

Letter Opener is a Mail.app plugin which decodes the .dat files inline, so the process is transparent to you, the recipient. The attachments appear like any others, and life is that much easier.

If your e-mail program does not support this particular blend of RTF, you’ll end up with that danged .dat attachment–and no easy way to open it. You have a couple of options.

Q. I received e-mail from a relative that says it is in a winmail.dat file. When I try to open the file, I get a message that says something like: "You are attempting to open a dat file.

I HATE winmail.dat files but have to deal with them every so often because we are still running Lotus Domino/Notes. I actually found a freeware utility that lets you open them and extract the ...

If you regularly receive winmail.dat files from business associates, Letter Opener is well worth the investment.

That could be harmful to the computer and the operating system. Q: I have received an email with an attachment called winmail.dat that I am unable to open. Can you tell me how to access this file?