winmail.dat Why don't I just get the attachment?

[themacko]

For whatever reason, my father who uses Outlook in Windows XP sends me emails with attachments (usually Word documents) that arrive in my Inbox with nothing but "winmail.dat" attached.

Anyone know what in the world this is, or better yet, how to fix it?

 

[cfleck]

basically he not sending emails as plain text and outlook uses that file to communicate the formatting. problem is, only outlook reads that formatting. anyway, look below...

these links do a pretty good job of explaining the problem...
http://www.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q138053/
http://www.pchell.com/support/winmaildat.shtml

this will help you decode it...
http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/