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T-bird changes .pdf files to winmail.dat

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Correspondent sends me an E-mail with an Adobe .pdf attachment. I open T-Bird and the message is there without the .pdf but with winmail.dat in its place. I go to Cox.net home page, open their klunky in-house E-mail program and the message is there with the .pdf.

Why? How do I get T-Bird to stop stripping my .pdf's? FYI this doesn't happen with all users, only a consistent few.

Correspondent sends me an E-mail with an Adobe .pdf attachment. I open T-Bird and the message is there without the .pdf but with winmail.dat in its place. I go to Cox.net home page, open their klunky in-house E-mail program and the message is there with the .pdf. Why? How do I get T-Bird to stop stripping my .pdf's? FYI this doesn't happen with all users, only a consistent few.

Chosen solution

The sender uses an incorrectly configured copy of Outlook that sends out a winmail.dat file. Fixing the copy of outlook is the preferred outcome as that stops the Typhoid Mary copy of "Outlook from continuing to send out malformed emails. But that is all in the article you were refered to.

The you were linked to;

  • Describes the problem.
  • Offers you a link to the Microsoft support article on how to fix the misconfigured copy of Microsoft Outlook
  • Offers you a link to an addon that will try and interpret the Microsoft proprietary formatted email body into something useful. Probably much the same thing as the web mail is doing.

So I would say not only is your question answered, but it has all the information you could possibly require. Unless you want someone to say there is no setting in Thunderbird to make it read malformed mail like the sender is sending out.

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All Replies (5)

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I read that article and it doesn't answer the question. That problem creates a winmail.dat. It doesn't overwrite and remove a .pdf.

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Chosen Solution

The sender uses an incorrectly configured copy of Outlook that sends out a winmail.dat file. Fixing the copy of outlook is the preferred outcome as that stops the Typhoid Mary copy of "Outlook from continuing to send out malformed emails. But that is all in the article you were refered to.

The you were linked to;

  • Describes the problem.
  • Offers you a link to the Microsoft support article on how to fix the misconfigured copy of Microsoft Outlook
  • Offers you a link to an addon that will try and interpret the Microsoft proprietary formatted email body into something useful. Probably much the same thing as the web mail is doing.

So I would say not only is your question answered, but it has all the information you could possibly require. Unless you want someone to say there is no setting in Thunderbird to make it read malformed mail like the sender is sending out.

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You are 100% correct Matt. I somehow missed the line "Because of this, any attachments sent with the original message are not displayed in Thunderbird's message pane. "

Bingo. I will forward this information to my sender's IT guy.

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That is Funny, these answers and the article that you point to state that the sender is the one who has a misconfigured copy of Microsoft Outlook. That is hilarious!!! The only email client in the world that misreads the Outlook messages is Thunderbird. The only client that put Outlook attachments as winmail.dat is Thunderbird.

Here is the list of top ten email clients based on acceptance and usage throughout the world taken from the website https://emailclientmarketshare.com/:

  1. 1 Gmail 38%
  2. 2 Apple iPhone 28%
  3. 3 Apple Mail 10%
  4. 4 Outlook 9%
  5. 5 Yahoo! Mail 4%
  6. 6 Apple iPad 2%
  7. 7 Samsung Mail 1%
  8. 8 Google Android 1%
  9. 9 Outlook.com 1%
  10. 10 Windows Live Mail 0%

Thunderbird is not even in the top ten!

The problem here is with Thunderbird. Please, please don't continue to pass it off as the sender's problem. Fix the problem.