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Thursday, Oct 30, 2003
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With God on Our Side
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Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003
winmail.dat
From time to time you may receive an email that says, "Check this out!", or "This picture is hilarious". But instead a a gif, jpeg, or some other recognizable file format, the attachment is a mysterious "winmail.dat" file.
Microsoft, being dissatisfied with mime encoding or uuencoding, has decided to invent their own method of attaching files to emails. Oh joy! I'm sure this is purely for my benefit, and has nothing to do with an attempt to undermine open standards and transparent protocols.
I've been doing my best to train Outlook users to check off the uuencode option, but I've found a new problem. Outlook is more than just an email program, it's a personal information manager. It handles schedules, to-do lists, contact database, etc. One can "forward" a contact, or a meeting schedule, or some other tidbit of Outlook information. This stuff is always sent in a winmail.dat.
My first idea to work around this was to forward those messages to a special email address tied to Outlook. Thus I could retain Eudora, which has served me faithfully since the mid-nineties, and is not a huge, gaping security hole, as my primary email client. But noooooooooo, you can't forward winmail.dat files. They must be sent directly from one Outlook client to another Outlook client. If Eudora is an intermediary, the winmail.dat is unintelligible at the recipient Outlook client. Nice, job Microsoft.
I came up with other ideas for workarounds, such as having two clients (Eudora and Outlook) service my pop account. But nothing that I could actually live with.
But then I found a man of God who is actively working to chip away at Evil. His program pulls apart the winmail.dat files into their original constituent components, and actually makes them useable. Can I get an "amen"?