MS Office attachment files show as mail.dat - how convert?

[anwhite13]

OK this is a problem I found in Mac OSX using its Mail application
but now with Mozilla Thunderbird I find the same thing:

when sending a MS Office file as an attachment from my Office Windows 2000 (or XP) system
it is received as a mail.dat attachment on Thunderbird !
This is downright silly!
Of course it's the stupid packaging that MS Outlook does to file attachments it sends -
and it expects the recipient to be Outlook which "knows" how to automatically UN-package
the mail.dat file to reveal the actual MS Office file.

But Thunderbird designers did not think this important to provide at least a an extension?
How are you going to convince Windows Outlook users to make the switch ?

Am I missing something, some setting ? I cannot find it.
Are you really gonna tell me Thundrebird does not know how to decode the mail.dat wrapper ?????
- AW

[tanstaafl]

There are a couple of viewers available for application/ms-tnef attachments. The most popular one is http://www.fentun.com/

See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... ght=fentun

[Guest]

Mahalo nui loa (from Hawaii) !!
That did the trick. Fentun works just fine as an unpacker of winmail.dat contents.
Much obliged!
AW