Christopher J. Buckley

Outlook, as everybody is aware, is horribly broken. It refuses to comply to standards and instead, rewrites its own. I implement MailScanner on the mail servers I am responsible for. Having a large client user-base using Outlook is always going to prove tricky. I’d found that MailScanner was marking ‘winmail.dat’ as ‘dangerous content’. Quite rightly, as it couldn’t parse and/or read it. Here’s the setting which allows MailScanner to read and deliver this content correctly:

# Some versions of Microsoft Outlook generate unparsable Rich Text
# format attachments. Do we want to deliver these bad attachments anyway?
# Setting this to yes introduces the slight risk of a virus getting through,
# but if you have a lot of troubled Outlook users you might need to do this.
# We are working on a replacement for the TNEF decoder.
# This can also be the filename of a ruleset.
Deliver Unparsable TNEF = yes
Use TNEF Contents = replace

Hope that fixes some of the problems i’ve experienced with useless Outlook.