ubuntu evolulution Email attachments are arriving as .dat files

Question

I am using evolution as my mail client on Ubuntu and sometimes the atachemets sent from a windows machine arive as .dat file. Do you know a fix for this ?

Answer 1

What is the exact file name? If it is winmail.dat: That is a well-known problem with mails from Microsoft Exchange. Exchange uses a special encoding to transport some Exchange-specific information.

See e.g. this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNEF

There's software to decode these attachments; it's listed in the article.

Answer 2

For Evolution to be able to read the Microsoft proprietary packaging of attachments, you must:

1. install the following packages:
   • libytnef0
   • evolution-plugins-experimental
   • (on a terminal, 'sudo apt-get install libytnef0 evolution-plugins-experimental' will do it.)
2. Quit Evolution;
3. Start Evolution again;
4. go to Edit/Plugins, and scroll down to "TNEF Attachment decoder"; enable it.
5. Close the Plugin Manager. You may have to bounce Evolution again, but this is it. I am closing this bug. Please do not hesitate in re-opening it if you feel we did not address your issue. Of course, life would be much more simpler for all if Microsoft were to default to Internet-compatible attachments...

I Hope it will help you.