It’s an old problem that keeps coming up – an email arrives with a winmail.dat attachment. We’ll explain and how to fix it from receivers point of view.
Winmail.dat problems were once common. They don’t happen a lot these days because Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server both have default options to stop it. But Office-Watch.com has had two pleas for help in the last few days, so it’s still possible.
See How to stop sending winmail.dat if you’re getting complaints about the messages you’re sending from Outlook.
Receiver
You might see a winmail.dat file in an email viewed in a web based email system, like this from Google’s Gmail.
You’ll also be able to see a plain text version of the message. If that text has all the information you need then don’t worry about winmail.dat (though there might be a problem with future messages from the same person).
If you need to see the full message then there’s two options:
- Ask the sender to resend the message in HTML format.
- We suggest sending a screen shot of the email as you see it … so the sender has a better idea of the problem you’re facing.
- Also send a link to our article How to stop sending winmail.dat specially written to help Outlook senders.
- Look at the same email using Outlook. You can do this if you access your cloud based email via various devices. You might see the winmail.dat attachment when viewing the email on a smartphone or non-Microsoft email program, try another method of viewing the same message from the same account. For example switch to Outlook to view the same message in its full glory.
- Forwarding the message won’t help (you’ll forward the winmail.dat file).
