Microsoft Outlook (as opposed to Outlook Express, or the webmail some of us use at LTU) sends attachments in such a way that they can ONLY easily be read by Outlook itself. If you try to read the message in OE, you'll see the body of the message, but you won't even know there was an attachment, unless you look at the size of the message. If you read it with our postoffice WebMail - you'll see one file called winmail.dat, but you won't be able to make sense of the file.
If you find yourself in this boat (you've received a message in OE that you know has an attachment, or you see the winmail.dat attachment) - you'll need to extract the winmail.dat file first, and then process it (with some other software that you need to download). [This assumes that you don't want to use Outlook to read it. I don't - thus I had to learn how to do this.]
This is not for the faint of heart - the steps are NOT difficult, but it is a relatively tiresome process. But, if you have no other choice .. then this works!
The main goal initially is to get the winmail.dat ... in our LTU WebMail, you can just extract that file (or if you are using some other email client that lets you see the winmail.dat - just extract it, and skip down to Step 6. Steps 1-5 deal with how to extract the hidden winmail.dat from OE (Outlook Express).
Steps for how to extract the winmail.dat file from OE (Outlook Express)
Step 1) Unless you know that someone sent you an attachment from Outlook - how do you know you have an attachment? {As I said above, it is initially "hidden" in OE.}
Consider the following image showing three recent emails. There is obviously an attachment from Glen, but there appears to be no attachment from either Valentina or Harold, right? But, I know there there is actually a hidden one from Valentina .. how do I know this?
In my screen of OE - not shown in the above image - I'm displaying in my OE a column that you probably are not seeing .. the size of the message. Knowing the size of a message is always useful, so we'll add that column to your OE in the next step!
Step 2) Right click on one of the column headers in OE (doesn't matter which one), and select COLUMNS from the popup list.
Click on SIZE to select it and you might want to move it up or down the list (that would be moving the column to the left or right in the final layout). Click OK when you are done. [For the example shown below, I moved the size over next to the sender name - normally I leave it over on the right side of the window.] Here we can see the effect of the hidden attachment - Valentina's message is larger than just a text message, even though it doesn't have the little flag that shows that Glen's message has an attached file.
Step 3) How do we get the hidden file out? Well, there is a multi-step process - we have to extract the text from the "source" of the message - save it in a particular way so that WinZip can open it - finally Winzip will show us the winmail.dat file
Go back to the list of email messages and right click on the message with the hidden file. Choose Properties. In the popup dialog, choose the DETAILS tab and then click the button for MESSAGE SOURCE. This will open a MESSAGE SOURCE window with the raw text of the message - we want to select all this text out. Easiest way is to RIGHT CLICK and choose SELECT ALL - then right click again and choose COPY.
Step 4) Having copied all that text out - we need to paste it into another file and name it with a particular file extention. Open up NOTEPAD (go to the START menu, then RUN, then type "notepad" (without the quotes) and click OK. Paste the message source that we copied into this notepad file. When you go to save the file (maybe using the filename "message") - make sure you have an extension ".uue" as shown below:
Step 5) Go back out to Windows Explorer, and locate your new file - it should show the little "winzip" icon for the file (we associated it with winzip by calling it a UUE file). Double click on the file, it should launch Winzip, and you should at least two files showing up ... finally, one of them is winmail.dat!
Click on the winmail.dat name to highlight it, and then click the EXTRACT button to extract that file - pick a location for the file. We still have to peel apart the winmail.dat, but at least we finally got it out of the OE message!
If you have joined us at this step, you should have a winmail.dat file that has been saved to the hard drive.
The problem is, we don't have anything on the machine (other than Outlook itself) to read the winmail.dat attachment. The most popular way to do this seems to involve downloading a free program (WMDecode) from here http://www.biblet.freeserve.co.uk/.
Step 6) Go to the above website and download the free WMDecode program (it is probably zipped, you'll need to extract it) - I recommend creating a new folder and extracting the program into that folder. Also copy the winmail.dat file you just saved into that same folder! This program is a 'drag and drop' program - you drag the winmail.dat over the program and drop it on top for it to run ... a little weird, but it works!
So, if you have the message.uue and the wmdecode.exe program in the same folder - click once on the message.uue and drg it over to the wmdecode.exe program (holding down the mouse button when you drag) - then let go of the mouse when you see the wmdecode.exe "light up" with the blue coloring to let you know it is over top. There will be a brief flash of a dos window, and then you should find 1 or more other files in the folder that correspond to any files that were in the attachment (as shown to the right above).
Whew - that was a long way to go to avoid Outlook (or if you don't have Outlook).
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Last Updated = Monday, 19-Mar-2007 14:00:39 EDT Of the 199 people that have visited this site, you are the most recent.