gingeo said:
Running 64bit Windows Vista and cannot open email .dat files.
RTF (Rich-Text Format) is a term used by Microsoft regarding their TNEF
proprietary document formatting structure. RTF actually applies to any
document formatting that goes beyond plain text, like adding bolding,
italics, super/subscript, tables, etc., so HTML is also an RTF scheme.
Microsoft's TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format) is an RTF
format that they can use in Outlook. "Neutral" has nothing to do
regarding usability in various e-mail clients, especially with
non-Microsoft e-mail clients.
The only e-mail client that understands TNEF is Microsoft's Outlook
product. Not even their Outlook Express product supports TNEF. The
only time RTF (TNEF) should be used by an Outlook-using sender is when
the sender can guarantee that the recipient is also using Outlook AND
that both sender and recipient are sharing the same Exchange mail
server; i.e., RTF should only be used for internal company e-mails
where all employees are forced to use Outlook and Exchange.
Since non-Outlook e-mail clients don't support TNEF, you need to have
something other than those e-mail clients to utilitize the winmail.dat
file which contains the formatting information (the plain text version
of the document is still available for reading inside any e-mail
client). While Outlook Express does not support viewing of winmail.dat
data, it will hide that attachment. You need to use a viewer that is
capable of opening and decoding the winmail.dat attachment and apply
its formatting information against the e-mail content. One such
utility (from those that are free versus the paid ones) is the Winmail
Opener from Eolsoft.
