Re: TNEF winmail.dat data disappears

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"Rich Matheisen [MVP]" <richnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0qom129afg13kkajic2ir9me53ad7kkb8e@xxxxxxxxxx

So, if you have the raw message in a file and you simply rename the
file to have a .eml suffix, you can open it with Outlook Express?

Yep.

I suppose that's a good thing, but I didn't think OE understood
ms-tnef. It's been a while since I looked, though.

It doesn't understand TNEF, it knows enough to ignore the format and
suppress attachments, hence the need to munge the ms-tnef and winmail.dat
strings.



Assuming that the file is, as you say, an exact representation of the
message and it's usable, what happens if you drop that file into the
"Pickup" directory on your Exchange server? It *should* be delivered
to the mailbox and it *should* be usable. If it's not, then it's time
to call MS and report this as a bug. None of use here has access to
the guts of the code so we can only see what goes in and what comes
out. The fact that it's a reproducible problem (as long as you have
the input file) I'm sure you'll either have the problem fixed quickly
or have them working on a fix in short order.

Dropping the message to Pickup gives the same result as the original
delivery - opens in Outlook with no attachment and 1KB message size
reported.


[ snip ]

It's as close as you're going to get to the raw data unless you do a
flat-file dump of the .stm file. :) The info that Exchange delivers
has to be usable by the client and delivered in the form you specify.

That surprises me - I assumed (dangerous thing to do, I know!) that
Exchange
provided the raw data and it was down to the client to decode it
correctly.

Not all clients can handle all formats. And maybe you don't want to
send HTML to POP3 clients, or MIME to clients that want UUENCODE.

That shouldn't affect how Exchange *stores* the message though, because you
might want to access a message with different clients that may or may not
understand a particular format.
Back in the OP I described using MDBVU32 to look at the message and Exchange
reports no attachments, yet I have decoded the original message that came in
using wmviewer (as described in a previous post) and that finds the
attachment fine. I would have thought that mdbvu32 would show an attachment.
It is possible that the original message is corrupt in some way and wmdecode
is working around or ignoring the corruption but Exchange is being a bit
more finicky.

Placing a paid support call with MS will become an option only if I can find
other instances of incoming ms-tnef mail with disappearing attachments. The
issue with the email discussed here has been solved by asking the sender's
IT support to turn off Rich Text when sending to our domains. It would be
good to know that there is not a problem at our end though...

Pete


.

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