Tired of those winmail.dat files? Letter Opener 3 can help

I just tried the freebie mentioned in post #1 and it works just fine. I might pay $10US for LO3, but that's about it.

YMMV

Frankly, in the interest of compatibility, shouldn't either Apple or MS or both make such a capability available free of charge as part of their software? I don't quite understand the reasoning against it. In any case, it costs too much.

@Dripps: I'm sure a lot of people have the same reaction as you. This plug-in is a one trick pony that I need maybe 4x a year. For the sake of convenience I would have purchased it a long time ago but US$29.99 is completely out of line with its value. The developers goofed on the pricing.

Anyone know of a way to open MS Outlook .msg files?

I still get these from a few select customers at the day job and for the price (free) TextWrangler does a bang up job with opening those pesky buggers and helps me identify all kinds of other attachments that come across without file extensions.

Systems such as MailScanner, deployed on one gateway machine for your entire company, will replace all the winmail.dat attachments with "real" attachments automatically and silently, so no-one in the company ever has to deal with them.

All your internal Windows boxes can be simply configured (in Outlook or Exchange as appropriate) to never generate winmail.dat files, so the only ones left are those coming in from outside.

MailScanner handles all of those for you without any installation on individual Macs/PCs or any licensing costs of any sort. It's all free!

dont' get it - why in the world do iCal, Address Book, and Mail have this problem in the first place - if Google can import from Outlook & export to iCal, and if programs like in this article can make the translation seamless - this should be integrated in Snow Leopard. Isn't this the very nature of the recent OS upgrade?!

Not a solution for everybody, but Gmail's web client seems to handle winmail.dat files just fine. Whenever one shows up in Apple Mail, I just fire up gmail.com and download the attachment there.

I was all set to try/buy this until I saw what it cost! For $30 I will put up with inconvenience and deal it.

I used get these back in the day. I havent' received any in recent memory.

Also, I just respond back to the sender that I can't read the message and to re-send in "normal" format. Usually does the trick.