 | Member with 2,310 posts. | | Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Redondo Beach, CA Experience: Advanced |
24-May-2005, 04:29 PM
#12 |
WINMAIL.DAT file, as JohnWill mentioned, are not necessarily the file you think it is. Some mail tools and/or servers will attach a WINMAIL.DAT file that may be nothing more than your email data (To, From, Date, Subject, Body, servers passed through, etc.) .
Just use Notepad to open the WINMAIL.DAT to see what sort of data is there. If it was created by a major application, like Word, Excel, WordPerfect, etc. then you should see some information near the beginning of the file that says something like that there.
If it is, as I suspect, just the email data and not your expected attachment, then you can ignore it.
If it is your expected attachment then try to change the extension to that proper extension.
If you notice that the file is a lot of "gobbly-gook" but also that just about every line has the exact number of characters (typically 64 or 65 characters) with never a space character on all those fixed length lines, then your file has been encoded for mail transmittal. There are many mail encoding schemes (Base64, uue, MIME, BinHex being the more popular ones), and you might see if there are any words near the top of the file that might give you a clue as to what encoding method was used.
By the way, if it is a mail encoded file, you might try an uncompressor (like WinZip) which can decode several encoding methods. You can first try to see if you can direct the uncompressor to the saved WINMAIL.DAT file. But if you don't know how to do that, then just try to rename the file to WINMAIL.UUE or even WINMAIL.ZIP. I have had that work for me, sometimes. If that opens the file, then extract the file inside to a safe place on your hard drive.
Good luck. |
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