Winmail.dat

[Bengt]

When sending E-mail form a VPE preview, the attached pdf-file is sometimes converted to a file named winmail.dat. It is especially when the receiver has a Mac-computer. The sender use Outlook. How can this be avoided? I use VPE 6.1 for the program.
Regards,
Bengt

[IDEAL Software Support]

This is a problem of Outlook, which thinks there is nothing else but Microsoft in the outside world, so they use this attachment format. As far as we know, you can configure Outlook to use standardized attachment formats, but we do not use Outlook, so we can not say how this is done.

[wriedmann]

PMFJI,

unfortunately the documentation about this is very well hidden.
If Outlook is used with Exchange, RTF (generation of WinMail.dat) should be disabled by the Exchange Administrator at the gateway level.

If Outlook is used standalone, you can disable TNEF (aka RTF) here

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\%1\Outlook\Preferences

where %1 can be between 11 for Office XP and 15 for Office 2013 (I would expect that the coming soon Office 2016 will use 16).

There can be a DWORD value named "DisableTNEF". If this value is not present, the status is unknown. A value of 1 will disable the generation of WInMail.dat. a value of 0 will allow it.

In my software, usually I have a menu option to set this programmatically.

HTH

Wolfgang

[Bengt]

In my computer I have no DisableTNEF. If I add such a key and set it to 1, does that mean that the pdf-file is sent with the mail and no WinMail.dat-file is created?

Regards,
Bengt

[wriedmann]

Normally, DisableTNEF does not exist, therefore the setting is not defined.

If you add the string value with the value of 1, the PDF file is not put into a winmail.dat file, but attached as is.

(winmail.dat contains the message itself and the attachments)

BTW: it is not a "problem" of VPE that a winmail.dat file is created, but has to do with MAPI. If you try to use MAPI yourself to do send attachments, you will have the same behaviour. Unfortunately, this is not documented by Microsoft anywhere (or at least, I could not find this in several years).

Wolfgang

[wriedmann]

sorry, a correction of my previous message: DisableTNEF is not a string value, but a dword value.

Wolfgang

[Bengt]

I have still not succeeded to solve this problem, and in fact it gets worse as many of my customers customers use Mac and strange E-mail solutions. It seems for instance be so that E-mail attachments works when the end customer use Gmail directly with the web, but if Gmail is configured in Macs E-mail client, they get a Winmail.dat-file.

The user of my program is very frustrated because when he gets a new customer he never knows If the mail he send works. However, he has observed that if he erases the E-mail address that my program has set by AddMailReceiver when he look at the mail to be sent in Outlook, and then type the same address in again, it always works and the attachment will reach the customer as a pdf-file. Can that be a clue to a solution?

Bengt

[IDEAL Software Support]

I suggest you look for a possibly more sophisticated component that is specialized in sending e-mails. You then could export the PDF with VPE to a file and engage the 3rd party component to e-mail it.

The messaging subsystem of Windows is a total mess. We spent months of getting this to work. But VPE is not an e-mail component, it is a Report- and PDF Library - the e-mail button in the preview window is just a nice add-on. And as explained before: using for example Thunderbird does not cause any problems.

You can catch the event when the e-mail button is clicked, and instruct VPE through the return code not to send the mail. In this moment you can send yourself the PDF as e-mail using a 3rd party component. For details, see the BeforeMail event in the reference manual.

[IDEAL Software Support]

After thinking a second time about it, you wrote:

E-mail attachments work when the end customers use Gmail directly with the web, but if Gmail is configured in Macs E-mail client, they get a Winmail.dat-file

This rather indicates that the e-mail client on the Mac is not correctly configured. On Windows, DisableTNEF - as explained by wriedmann above - should work. It seems the receiver is forming a winmail.dat file from it. Just out of curiosity: what mail client is this?