How to deal with winmail.dat in Gnus

How to deal with winmail.dat in Gnus

[H. Dieter Wilhelm]

Hello Emacs-26.3

Today I sent to myself an email from Outlook with a PDF attachment and I
received an email with a winmail.dat attachement!  Never seen such a
thing in my live.

It seems that Gnus is just saving it as a winmail.dat file on the disc.
What are you doing with such an abomination under GNU-Linux? ;-)

Thanks a lot

       Dieter
-- 
Best wishes
H. Dieter Wilhelm
Zwingenberg, Germany

Re: How to deal with winmail.dat in Gnus

[tomas]

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On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 09:48:39AM +0200, H. Dieter Wilhelm wrote:
> Hello Emacs-26.3
> 
> Today I sent to myself an email from Outlook with a PDF attachment and I
> received an email with a winmail.dat attachement!  Never seen such a
> thing in my live.

This seems to be a TNEF (aka "Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format")
from Microsoft (God may have pity of their souls).

According to [1] there are a few options for normal folks to decode
that stuff.

> It seems that Gnus is just saving it as a winmail.dat file on the disc.
> What are you doing with such an abomination under GNU-Linux? ;-)

I try to get out of my way to avoid that stuff (that includes recommending
my customers to do the same -- think network effects and all that).

Cheers
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format#Decoding

-- t

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Re: How to deal with winmail.dat in Gnus

[Eric S Fraga]

On Wednesday,  1 Apr 2020 at 09:48, H. Dieter Wilhelm wrote:
> Today I sent to myself an email from Outlook with a PDF attachment and I
> received an email with a winmail.dat attachement!  Never seen such a
> thing in my live.

You need to tell Outlook to send using MIME, not it's own
"standard".  When our organization moved fully to Outlook, I spent the
first few months pointing this out to people.  Eventually, in our place,
the default was changed somehow.

On Linux, there's a tool called "tnef" which will decode these
files.  Not sure how to get gnus to apply that, however.

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50 & org 9.3.6 on Debian bullseye/sid

Re: How to deal with winmail.dat in Gnus

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Wednesday,  1 Apr 2020 at 09:48, H. Dieter Wilhelm wrote:
>> Today I sent to myself an email from Outlook with a PDF attachment and I
>> received an email with a winmail.dat attachement!  Never seen such a
>> thing in my live.
>
> You need to tell Outlook to send using MIME, not it's own
> "standard".  When our organization moved fully to Outlook, I spent the
> first few months pointing this out to people.  Eventually, in our place,
> the default was changed somehow.
>
> On Linux, there's a tool called "tnef" which will decode these
> files.  Not sure how to get gnus to apply that, however.

You can pipe a part through an external program using "K |". I don't
know if it's possible to install an automatic filter when saving the
attachments with "X m". MIME terrifies me and I try to minimize my
interaction with it.