I have just received an email contained an attachment namedly winmail.dat. At the first glance, I guessed that it must be a kind of microsoft format. My email reader, Mozilla Thunderbird should recognize it seamlessly. Sadly, it tried to open winmail.dat in MPlayer. However, I found a better way to read that file.

First of all, you need to install a small tool called tnef.

sudo apt-get install tnef

Then you are able to see what are in that archive.

tnef -t winmail.dat

Extract it to current directory.

tnef winmail.dat

Extract it to other directory.

mkdir tmp
tnef -C tmp winmail.dat

Enjoy!

Tags: winmail.dat, ubuntu, edgy eft, tnef