282822 - Outlook "MS-TNEF" format not supported (only shows winmail.dat in attachment list)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 77811

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Kevin Boyd]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When a user receives an RTF email message from an Outlook 97/2000 user, any
files attached to the email are lumped in to the "winmail.dat" attachment, in
the MS-TNEF format. I would like this file format to be understood by
Thunderbird; in a corporate environment, this can somewhat slow the adoption of
Thunderbird. Plus, it results in odd stares from other companies when you ask
them to send in plain text format.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find someone with Outlook 97 or 2000 to send you an email. This common
creature can typically be found in a corporate environment, usually in a company
that subscribes to the "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" philosophy.
2. Make sure they attach some extra files to the email. May I suggest joke
photos or highly confidential documents that you'd rather not have to send to
the IT department for extraction from the 'winmail.dat' file?
3. Check your email.
4. Become frustrated and confused by the peculiar and lonely "winmail.dat" file.
5. Ask the sender to send it in plain text format.
6. Try to hide when they start ranting about how 'it just works' when they send
it to other people. Perhaps put in a jibe about how Thunderbird is free, and
Outlook costs annoyingly large amounts.

Actual Results:  
All attachments were lumped into a 'winmail.dat' file, which only a third-party
utility could extract (even then, I don't believe it was available for Linux).
And the people at the other company no doubt thought that we were incompetent or
behind the times technically speaking.

Expected Results:  
It should have provided access to the individual attached files, extracting them
from the winmail.dat file in some way. If it could remotely upgrade the other
company to Thunderbird, too, that would be great - though I suppose it might
annoy *their* tech people. ;-)

Similar bug reports, though not entirely centered on this topic:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226836
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=266088

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

see also Bug 173693

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 77811 ***