WINMAIL.DAT

[desmo]

Hi all,

I am having a problem with attachments that is driving my users mad (and aggressive). We run Scalix 10 on RHEL4 for 45 users connecting via Outlook2003/Outlook2002. Sometimes attachments (Word/Excel mainly) get to the recipient converted into a winmail.dat file. Also it looks like many of our emails get caught in spam filters on the other end.

Now, I tried but I cannot get any help from the recipients side, so I have no way to check why the filter has been triggered or why the attachments have been converted to winmail.dat, but I am wondering if there is anything at all I can do on our side to prevent this.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
Would it make any difference if we used a smarthost rather than having Scalix directly delivering the message?

Thanks, have a nice day

Simone

[kanderson]

I remember this being an issue a while ago. What version of the MAPI connector are your users running? If they're still on 9.x, I'd upgrade them to 10.

Kev.

[desmo]

Hi Kev,

Thanks for your reply. This is a recent (01/2007) installation, the connector is version 10.0.0.352 and Scalix is v.10.1 Small Business with 50 licenses, in an Active Directory win 2k domain. Some more info:

scalix-server-10.0.5.3-1.rhel4
scalix-swa-10.0.5.1-1
scalix-sac-10.0.1.26-1
scalix-res-10.0.1.26-1

omshowrt -q all
UNIX internet MIME
UNIX internet,tnef TNEF
LOCAL mail,bristol

In my sync agreement I have:

IM_OMADDRESS=/internet,tnef

Thanks

Simone

[desmo]

Hi,

I just tried sending from the webmail and this worked out just fine. When I try to send from Outlook, no matter what format I choose plain/HTML/richtext it always ends up merging all attachments in WINMAIL.DAT.

Any help would be really appreciated, thanks

[kanderson]

This WILL be a problem with the connector. Are you sending as HTML or Plain Text? I'd suggest trying the other for now, but what you really want is a newer verion of the connector.

I would recommend that you download 10.5 community from the forum, and unzip it. You can just install it over what you have on the server now, and it will be upgraded. It will see your license, and automagically switch from community to SBE as well. Follow that up with client upgrades to the new connector as well. If you'd like, you could try just switching the connector and leaving the server alone, but it's not overly recommended. DO NOT use the scalix 11 connector with v10 on the server.

DO MAKE A BACKUP OF /var/opt/scalix BEFORE UPGRADING YOUR SERVER.

Kev.

[desmo]

Thanks for the suggestion, I tried to use connector 10.0.5 on the client side but the results haven't changed. It is a very weird situation, if I send the same email from the same PC to two different users on the same server (user1@domain.com and user2@domain.com) the first one gets it right and the second one gets the winmail.dat which is really confusing. I have now tried disabling NOD32 scanning outgoing email and it seems the attachments are correctly delivered, but I think it is a bit early to say this is the solution. On the other hand every user has NOD32 installed (and many other companies I assume) but not all users are affected by this issue, so again it doesn't really make sense. Could it be possible that for some reason this happens only under heavy load? Is there any logging option I should turn on so that I can see when and where exactly the attachments get converted to winmail.dat?

I will let you know if we make any progress, thanks

Simone

[desmo]

Hi,

I changed the way sendmail delivers messages to use a smarthost, and disabled NOD32 outside scan but further testing seem to suggest this doesn't solve the issue.

Any help appreciated

Simone

[cmacmillan]

Hi,
I've had this issues many times when migrating mailboxes using PST file exports. The best way around it is to use a 3rd party application to open the winmail.dat files.

I use: http://www.kopf.com.br/winmail/ - this is free and user friendly.

Clearly you may have already considered this but just in case you have not.

[desmo]

Hi Cmacmillan

Thanks for your reply. I am not sure I understand, we are having issues sending emails from Scalix to external users that receive winmail.dat rather than the correct attachment, is this the same problem you had?

Thanks

Simone

[kanderson]

For someone who IS seeing this problem, Can you please verify that if they send an Rich Text message that the problem occurs, and that if they send a plain text or HTML, that it does not?

THnaks
Kev.

[desmo]

Hi Kev,

It doesn't work like that, the problem occurs regardless of the format chosen for the email. user@scalix send to user@domain the email arrives with a winmail.dat attachment. It has happened that just resending the message after 10 minutes worked just fine. This is with HTML (mainly), plain text, rich text, and whatever option the contact is on (let outlook decide, send only plain text etc).
I am sorry, it is completely random, I enabled Outlook logging and disabled NOD32 for all users and today seems we haven't had problems.

Any suggestion welcome, thank you

Simone

[kanderson]

Sorry. I'm stumped. We've looked at everything I've seen before, and it's none of that.

Kev.

[Valerion]

I had a similar complaint from one of my customers a while ago. I investigated it, but we couldn't reproduce the issue and subsequent mails from the same person didn't have WINMAIL.DAT attachments.

I added SR_FILTER_TYPES_OF_ATT=TRUE to ~/sys/general.cfg to be on the safe side, although that option has been unnecessary for a while now. It never re-occurred.

[desmo]

Thanks Kev, Thanks Valerion

I will leave it as it is for now (NOD32 disabled) and see if they have the problem again. If they still have, I will try the general.cfg change and a fresh Office install.

Thanks again, will keep you posted

Simone

[Richard Hall]

Hi Simone,

WINMAIL.DAT attachments are produced by Scalix when it thinks that the recipient is an Exchange user as Exchange requires the WINMAIL.DAT attachment to hold all the extra richness that Outlook provides. The format of the WINMAIL.DAT file is TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format).

Scalix will produce a WINMAIL.DAT attachment for any external recipients that use the ‘tnef’ route of Internet Gateway. There are a number of ways that recipients will be assigned this ‘tnef’ route:
[list]Reply to a message which is ‘rich text’ from an Exchange user

The ‘omconfux –T’ option is used to specify TNEF domain(s). (‘omshowux’ will show any configured TNEF domains.)

The recipient is configured in the Scalix directory with a ‘tnef’ route

When sending a message from Outlook the recipient Internet properties are changed to specify “Send using Outlook Rich Text formatâ€