Outlook dual accounts (Exchange/POP) one sends winmail.dat

[Najemikon]

Hi,

We are running an Exchange server and four of our users also have a POP account configured in their Outlook 2003 clients.

They have two html signatures configured, one for each account. So when they click 'new', they get a blank message with one signature, ready to send from their default Exchange account. If they pick the POP account from the drop down box above the message, it changes the signature.

This works fine for three users, but when the fourth sends from his POP account, it sends as the winmail.dat attachment, which is promptly removed by our firewall and the recipient gets a plain text version of the original.

Through testing I am sure this is just the POP account. His Exchange settings send correctly. I can switch the signatures around and the problem doesn't change.

So in summary, any HTML sig sent from his POP account will be turned into winmail.dat and replaced with plain text. It does not happen for the other users, and all have the same settings and were setup in the same manner.

He doesn't use any kind of custom stationery and the recipients come from the Active Directory (I know there's a setting in contacts that can cause this), But even if he was, he can send the exact same message from Exchange and not have a problem; choosing the account and automatically changing the sig can be the last thing you do before sending.

It's so frustrating! Any ideas?



Jon

 

[donb01]

You say all the users "have the same settings." Are you referring to just the POP setup settings for the mail account, or did you go into Tools - Options and look at all the mail composition settings? i.e. Are 3 users using Word as their E-mail editor and he is not, does he have his non-exchange mail create as plain text instead of HTML by default, etc? Are they all using the same POP3 provider, or is is it possible the one with problems is using a provider that is restricting the mail transfer settings? I know I used to have this problem with people using the Netscape mail client and they were telling it to attach forwarded documents "as attachments" rather than "in-line" and the client was always doing that.

Hopefully something in here will spawn some new ideas for you.

 

[Najemikon]

Hi, thanks for the response.

Yes, when I said "all settings" I did also mean composition. All the users use Word as editor. Am I right in thinking though that the composition settings would apply to both accounts anyway? The Exchange compositions work fine, even if I use the signature intended for the POP account.

Speaking of which, all these users have the same POP settings and provider. I suppose it is possible that the provider could have a mistake in this users profile? But our own internal firewall is stripping the attachment before it gets to the POP server anyway, so I know it's Outlook at fault.

The more I think about this, the more it seems obvious that it is down to a setting applied to his POP account, however I can't find many settings that are unique to the account. They are all global. The remark you make about attachments is interesting though, so I'll have a closer look at that side of things.

Thanks again,



Jon

 

[58sniper]

winmail.dat isn't a problem with the sending side, usually. It's a problem on the receiving side. Most messages that have RTF or formatting info are sent with winmail.dat. It's the receiving side's responsibility to interpret the contents of it, and properly render the received message. Some systems, especially older systems, can't handle the formatting of winmail.dat, so they just render the message as plain text, and attach the .dat file to it.

Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[Najemikon]

That's true, Pat. Our first problem is that the firewall strips winmail.dat though. I could easily set the policy to leave it alone, but I'm more interested in why it does it at all just in this one case!