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Blame Outlook For Annoying 'Winmail.dat'

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By ROB PEGORARO, The Washington Post

Published: October 1, 2007

Some of my buddies' e-mails show up with an unopenable attachment called 'winmail.dat.' Am I at fault, or are my friends?

You can blame your pals, but the responsibility properly falls on Microsoft, whose Outlook e-mail program can format messages in a way that puzzles other mail software.

So instead of seeing the 'rich text' formatting of the original message, you get a plain-text copy, plus a mysterious 'winmail.dat' attached file.

You can read these attachments with extra software. If you run Windows, try the free Winmail Opener ( www.eolsoft.com). If you use Mac OS X, a shareware program called OMiC ( www.restoroot.org) will let Apple's Mail program read these attachments. It costs about $14.

But you shouldn't feel compelled to add any software because winmail.dat files almost never contain any useful information. I opened the last 10 messages to arrive with a winmail.dat attachment in OMiC; my only reward for that work was seeing each message in a different typeface or two.

If your copy of Outlook has been a source of winmail.dat pollution, you can change its behavior. See the tech-support article at support.microsoft.com/kb/278061 for instructions on how to turn off this annoying defect.

Should I use DVD-R or DVD+R media with my DVD recorder?

With any reasonably new DVD burner, you can buy whichever kind of disc happens to be cheaper. Both work just as well. (For very long recordings, look for 'DVD+R DL' blanks, which offer twice as much storage space as usual.)

Old DVD burners, however, often accept only one of the two main formats for recordable discs. To be sure, look on the front of the recorder or in its manual to see what formats it will accept.

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