He sends me some strange attachments...

[Helenni]

Hello to everyone! I'm Helenni, and my native language is Russian, so I'm sorry for possible mistakes.
I have a friend who lives in USA. He helps me to learn English. He corrects my letters. I appreciate this correspondence and his help very much.
But...he often attaches some strange files to his letters: winmail.dat (application/ms-tnef, 20K)
They always have a different size. When I delete this files or the whole letter, he sends them again.
I tryed to open some of them, but I just couldn't open them in any programs I had tryed.
Please help me to know what stuff he sends. Is it dangerous for my PC?
I have no reasons not to trust to my American friend, but he ignored my question about those files.
What do you think? I can try to send one of this files if anybody is interested and wants to help.
Thank you in advance!

[Helenni]

I tryed to open it in Word. This is the stuff I had received:

x&#****;>"
&#**06; &#**06; &#*076; &#*080; &#*026; IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note * &#*026; &#*026; &#*062;
! &#**06; O '

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) 6 p ** September 2006 q &#*046;&#*06*;&#*0**;7x&#*0**;&#*0**;|}&#*0*4;&#*04*;E&#*087;¦¦&#*0*0;' Y&#***5;›
SMTP: (there was his email address here)

@
¶U.&#*0**;&#*06*;&#*046;
&#*04*; »?&#***4;LOB‹&#*058;&#***2;W&#*05*;V&#*04*;z&#*042;&#*026;

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&#*026;&Sp“6&#*0*6;&#*0**;...

And so on... There was a few pages there.

[toast]

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format[/url]
or
[url]http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm[/url]
or
if you want to- [url]http://www.netadmintools.com/art*2*.html[/url]

T

[Halla]

He probably doesnt know the files are even being sent. You can either ignore the files or do him a favor and tell him to ditch Outlook and pick up Thunderbird ( [url]http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/[/url] ) which is free, highly customizable, and can import his existing Outlook files.

In other words, the file isnt dangerous, he doesnt mean to send the file, its his mail client thats doing it.

[Helenni]

Thank you both very much for your help! I will tell my friend about these files.
Now I need'n worry they are dangerous for my computer.

[Newby_Programme]

Email users sometimes find that they receive email messages with a strange file attached, called winmail.dat. When they attempt to open this file, either it can't be opened at all, or it contains "garbage" data.

The situation causing this is that people are using several different email client programs to receive, read, and send email. The most commonly used email client programs at GPC seem to be Microsoft Outlook and Netscape (specifically the Messenger component), with a small minority of techno-geeks using Eudora. Unfortunately, Outlook does not "play nice" with the other email programs all the time. This causes problems, not for the sender of the email, but the recipient, particularly when actual files are attached to messages.

The Solutions
If you are receiving these winmail.dat files
I assume at this point that you are not using Microsoft Outlook as your email client program, since this wouldn't be a problem if you were using it.

One solution to the problem is to visit [url]http://www.biblet.com[/url] and download the WMDecode program found there (look about halfway down the page). This will at least allow you to decode the winmail.dat files and extract any useful attachments from them.

Other than this, there's not much you can do on your end to fix the problem, since it's not your email program generating the problem. If you just don't want to deal with the problem, the other approach is to reply to the individual who sent you the offending email and ask that they re-send the message, with the attached files, as a plain text message, not in Rich Text Format or HTML. If they don't know how to do this, you can, of course, refer them to this document!





Well hope this helps at all. Good Luck