Winmail.dat received only by some users
I have searched high and low and done everything suggessted when it comes to winmail.dat attachments. However, I cannot find a solution to something that just started happening 10 days ago. Running Exchange 2010 all SP and rollups. Users have outlook 2010. As stated 10 days ago, a couple users started getting emails with winmail.dat attachments from outside emails. These other companies are using exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 (various companies). When I am copied on the emails (testing solutions for this problem) all attachments come through normally, but the 2 users that I am working with are still getting winmail.dat attachments. Figured I'd eliminate outlook and just check OWA. The 2 users OWA accounts (outlook is closed and not running at all at this point) still have the winmail.dat attachments in OWA. This is the part that is most confusing to me as it seems like a issue with their mailboxes as it is now happening without outlook involved. In addition to the RTF settings on the exchange server, HTML/plain test settings on the clients, we have also removed any rules and deleted the contacts in the users contact folder just to be sure there isn't anything funky there. Also checked with the senders, they are all using outlook 2007 or 2010 and sending emails as HTML and as mentioned earlier, all these companies are using exchange 2003 or later. What am I missing?
March 30th, 2011 11:09pm

Quote: “The 2 users OWA accounts (outlook is closed and not running at all at this point) still have the winmail.dat attachments in OWA” Does the issue happen permanently for these two users, and only to these two users? Please check the message headers on the problematic messages Please enable the pipeline tracing and content conversion tracing, send the test message from senders to the problematic recipients again, and then check the copies of the message Resources: Enable Pipeline Tracing Content Conversion Tracing How e-mail message formats affect Internet e-mail messages in Outlook James Luo TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
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March 31st, 2011 8:49am

Yes, it's consistent for these 2 users. I have enabled tracing so we'll see what we get. I don't see anything strange in the header info on any of the emails. I can post some of them here but is there anything I should be looking at specifically?
March 31st, 2011 4:44pm

That's strange, that typically happens to contacts but not MEUs. If you get stumped, I'd be inclined to move the mailbox to another store as this will create a new mailbox. (incase there is mailbox corruption)James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com
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April 1st, 2011 3:02am

After send mail to both of the problematic user and the working user, you can then compare two copies, and seek for the difference. Agree with Chong. If the message is identical, the issue would be related to the problematic mailbox itself, moving mailbox could fix certain corruptionPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
April 1st, 2011 6:16am

James and James, Headers look identical. Tracing is not really turning up anything compared to tracing on "normal" messages that aren't getting the winmail.dat. Your suggesstion to move to another store was in the back of my head, but I was waiting to see if someone else felt that course of action was the next step. I'll do that and report back. Thanks
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April 1st, 2011 2:52pm

Did moving the mailbox solve the problem?
May 11th, 2011 5:53pm

i need to know what solved this problem. I am having the same type of issue. We are running Exchange 2007 with Outlook 2010 clients and one person will receive winmail.dat files while others copied on the same email will receive a normal email with a Word document attached. Of course I can use a read on it and it shows the winmail.dat file properly but this is not the fix.George
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August 29th, 2011 11:04am

bumping for a solution!!! also having this problem randomly
August 30th, 2011 3:50pm

I too am having these exact same problems at my organisation. We are on Exchange 2010 with clients running Outlook 2010. A handful of users are getting winmail.dat files instead of the attachments, other users on the same exchange server will receive the same email with the attachment as it should be (e.g. a .doc or .pdf etc.). It's really frustrating for the users it's happening to and they are getting on at me to sort it but there doesn't seem to be a solution!!!! Please, has anyone been able to resolve this? Note that I also did move one of the affected users mailboxes to a new store but it didn't fix it.
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August 31st, 2011 8:21am

OK I think i have it! I noticed that the email address that we were having issues receiving attachments from all had a contact card created for them in exchange. I went into the contact card for these external email addresses and changed "use MAPI rich text format" to NEVER. i believe that the because these email address were contacts in exchange, no matter what the outlook setting was, when the clients sent the messages off to the server for delivery, Exchange would override the setting with the one in the contact card. Let me know if this helps anyone else.
September 2nd, 2011 9:25am

Yes, changing "use MAPI rich text format" to NEVER may be one solution. But settings in Personal Contacts might also be brought into play. See the thread below: winmail.dat http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchangesvrgeneral/thread/19e628ae-9cd4-490d-bc87-b225f866e259MCTS: Messaging | MCSE: S+M
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September 2nd, 2011 12:21pm

OK I think i have it! I noticed that the email address that we were having issues receiving attachments from all had a contact card created for them in exchange. I went into the contact card for these external email addresses and changed "use MAPI rich text format" to NEVER. i believe that the because these email address were contacts in exchange, no matter what the outlook setting was, when the clients sent the messages off to the server for delivery, Exchange would override the setting with the one in the contact card. Let me know if this helps anyone else. My issue is with an exchange 2007 mailbox - not a mail contact. Has anyone a solution for me?
September 4th, 2011 8:51pm

OK I think i have it! I noticed that the email address that we were having issues receiving attachments from all had a contact card created for them in exchange. I went into the contact card for these external email addresses and changed "use MAPI rich text format" to NEVER. i believe that the because these email address were contacts in exchange, no matter what the outlook setting was, when the clients sent the messages off to the server for delivery, Exchange would override the setting with the one in the contact card. Let me know if this helps anyone else. My issue is with an exchange 2007 mailbox - not a mail contact. Has anyone a solution for me? Yes, we need to understand that the issue here IS NOT external recipients getting winmail.dat files. The issue here is that internal clients running exchange server mailboxes are receiving winmail.dat files from incoming mail and that it is happening to some users but not others on the same exchange server.
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September 5th, 2011 6:38am

I have also seen this on Exchange servers. More often in the days og Exchange 5.x / 2000 / 2003 than now. Have these senders send the messages in Plain Text. That should work. Winmail.dat attachments are included in received e-mail messages in Outlook Last Review: March 7, 2011 - Revision: 5.0 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278061MCTS: Messaging | MCSE: S+M
September 5th, 2011 7:54pm

I have also seen this on Exchange servers. More often in the days og Exchange 5.x / 2000 / 2003 than now. Have these senders send the messages in Plain Text. That should work. Winmail.dat attachments are included in received e-mail messages in Outlook Last Review: March 7, 2011 - Revision: 5.0 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278061 MCTS: Messaging | MCSE: S+M That's not really a viable solution as there is no way to get all the external organisations who send emails to our organisation to send in plain text. Again, I stress that the problem is that emails sent from external organisations are being received by our exchange server mailboxes with winmail.dat files instead of the attachments (but only for some users). Changing the format in which emails are sent from our exchange mailboxes will in no way help as that is not the issue. The issue is purely incoming mail to our exchange server being received with the winmail.dat files which should not be happening as exchange/outlook should be able to receive and display emails in all formats.
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September 6th, 2011 7:01am

OK I think i have it! I noticed that the email address that we were having issues receiving attachments from all had a contact card created for them in exchange. I went into the contact card for these external email addresses and changed "use MAPI rich text format" to NEVER. i believe that the because these email address were contacts in exchange, no matter what the outlook setting was, when the clients sent the messages off to the server for delivery, Exchange would override the setting with the one in the contact card. Let me know if this helps anyone else. My issue is with an exchange 2007 mailbox - not a mail contact. Has anyone a solution for me? My issue was internal users receiving winmail.dat from external contacts, to clarify, i created contact cards for specific email address that i wanted to include in a distribution list. I believe that the settings in that contact card adjusted the formatting when receiving email from those addresses, that's why changing use MAPI rich text to "never" resolved my issue. are you sure that all the email address in question do not have a contact card somewhere in exchange?
September 6th, 2011 11:10am

"..are you sure that all the email address in question do not have a contact card somewhere in exchange?" ..how do I determine that?
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September 6th, 2011 8:14pm

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact
September 7th, 2011 9:05am

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact There's no mail contacts listed under recipient configuration on my exchange management console, any other suggestions?
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September 7th, 2011 11:31am

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact ..yeah that is what I thought you meant but as I said, it is the exchange mailbox not a mail contact that is receiving these attachments. I don't understand why or how you would have a mail contact for an exchange mailbox. I only have 1 mail contact and that is so I can redirect the mailbox to an external domain email address (this user is not affected).
September 7th, 2011 4:42pm

I only have 1 mail contact and that is so I can redirect the mailbox to an external domain email address (this user is not affected). It looks like our issue was different then yours, we were receiving winmail.dat attachments to our exchange mailboxes from ONLY the external address that we created contact cards for. (it would seem that you and i created these contact cards for the same reason). Users that did not receive emails regularly from those address that were associated with an exchange contact card were not affected.
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September 8th, 2011 11:14am

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact There's no mail contacts listed under recipient configuration on my exchange management console, any other suggestions? are you using an MMC or are you directly working on the exchange server?
September 8th, 2011 11:21am

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact There's no mail contacts listed under recipient configuration on my exchange management console, any other suggestions? are you using an MMC or are you directly working on the exchange server? I'm working directly on exchange server, I don't have any mail contacts listed under recipient configuration. This is getting to be quite a problem in our organisation with colleagues getting increasingly irritated by receiving winmail.dat files. I had a typical example this morning where one colleague received an email from an external sender but got a winmail.dat attached instead of 5 pdf files which should have been attached. We got the sender to resend the email with attachements to my address (on same exchange server) and the attachments came through no problem. So frustrating, does anyone have any further suggestions to try?
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September 14th, 2011 4:38am

under recepiant configuration look in mail contact There's no mail contacts listed under recipient configuration on my exchange management console, any other suggestions? are you using an MMC or are you directly working on the exchange server? I'm working directly on exchange server, I don't have any mail contacts listed under recipient configuration. This is getting to be quite a problem in our organisation with colleagues getting increasingly irritated by receiving winmail.dat files. I had a typical example this morning where one colleague received an email from an external sender but got a winmail.dat attached instead of 5 pdf files which should have been attached. We got the sender to resend the email with attachements to my address (on same exchange server) and the attachments came through no problem. So frustrating, does anyone have any further suggestions to try? my last suggestion would be to make sure that you whitelist the sender domain on any firewall/spam filter/content filtering. Make sure that nothing touches the email through transport until it gets to the mailbox. outside of that, im not sure...
September 14th, 2011 9:18am

how was that solved?! i mean the problem posted on top i am having exactly the same and was reading through the above until i reached the end with nothing!!!
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September 22nd, 2011 10:41am

I don't think there is a definitive solution yet. Hopefully, Stoop will come back with Microsoft's answer. OWA client *RECEIVES* winmail.dat attachments http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchangesvrclients/thread/207469f1-9f2a-49dc-8a4b-d8b70e42c855 See also this thread: Exchange 2010 receiving winmail.dat http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchange2010/thread/d3f58f62-2f23-484a-a641-c6ed1577bbdbMCTS: Messaging | MCSE: S+M
September 22nd, 2011 6:18pm

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