Recently i always get a complain from my user regarding their email attachment problem. They received an email-message from customer with a file, named winmail.dat, as attachment. They fail to open that attachment file using Thunderbird mail client. But for those Microsoft Outlook user, they able to see and open the attachment file.

It is because Microsoft Outlook e-mail program sometimes sends e-mails in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). Most other e-mail programs, including Thunderbird, do not understand TNEF and will the e-mail attachment as “winmail.dat”

To Read, view, open winmail.dat email attachments, you have to convert it. There is a free application on Mac OS X platform called TNEF’s Enough that can open winmail.dat files and extract the attachment

Below are the link to download TNEF’s Enough

• If you use Mac OS X 10.5 and above, just click HERE to download

• If you use older Mac OS X version, click HERE to download

To extract winmail.dat, just follow below steps:-

• Save the attachment on your computer.
• Launch TNEF’s Enough application
  
• Click on the ‘File ->Open’ from the TNEF’s Enough Menu and select the winmail.dat
• After that, you will see the content of the .dat attachment

• Just click Save button to save the content of .dat attachment to the location that you prefer.

If you have another tips to solve this problem, please leave your comments here.

Last week, i got the complain from my user about her Apple Mail problem. According to her, she can receive new message from mail server but cannot send mail because the Send button on a new message is greyed out and does not respond.

So, i just help her to test her apple mail settings via Connection Doctor. The Connection Doctor can successfully log into the SMTP server.

I just proceed to check the settings of mail to make sure the settings for the mail server are correct. I Choose Preferences from the Mail menu and Click Accounts in the Preferences window. On the Account Preferences, i found that do not have a SMTP selected for that account.

To solve this problem, i just reselect the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) and tick the option Use only this server. After that, i create an email and click the Send Button to send out. It is working fine now.

Next time, if you facing the same problem again, please ensure that the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)” pop-up menu is not set to “None”. If it is, select your server from the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)” pop-up menu if it appears.

I found a problem with Word 2008. User sending Word .doc attachments from Apple Mail. When i received the email, i tired to double click the word attachment, it prompt out a screen as show as below

I totally cannot open this file with Open Office and Words 2004. It only allow me to open this file with Word 2008.

How to solve this problem? This problem can be solve by save word 2008 (.docx) to word 2003/2004 compatible format. Please tick “Use Windows-friendly attachments” before you attach the attachment.

If you have any others solution, please leave comment.

Is there any way to increase the font size in mail?

Today i just got this question from 1 of my colleague, she received an email. She can’t see the content of the email because of the font size. So, can we increase the font size? The answer is yes.

Here are the steps to do that:

When you want to increase the font size of your messages, just press command +.

If you want to decrease the font size, just press command -.

Is it easy to do that?? Just try it