Chris-Linfoot.net

I have written here before about the habit Domino has of delivering raw MIME as an attachment named C.DTF to users whose PAB preferences say they prefer Notes rich text. This only happens when the MIME is broken in some way and Domino's MIME to CD conversion can't do anything with it. Because C.DTF is raw MIME, you can just save the file to disk somewhere, rename it filename.eml and open it in a mail package that understands MIME formatted email messages like this. Suitable packages include Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Mail and MS Outlook Express.

Complementing C.DTF, not infrequently we see C.DAT (sometimes also Winmail.DAT or ATT0001.DAT) which despite the similar name has an entirely different root cause.

These files are made by Outlook users who insist on adding the email addresses of Notes users to their local address books with the flag "this person uses Microsoft Outlook" set to "yes". This in turn causes email sent from those Outlook users to Notes users to be delivered containing those pesky .DAT files which contain the Outlook message in TNEF format (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format).

Aside: Transport neutral? Transport neutral? The same could be said of any piece of data sent encapsulated in a MIME message, including all viruses! I'll give you transport neutral you (trails off grumbling inaudibly)...

Julian Robichaux recently published a nice little agent that can be added to a user's mail file to convert these files back into comparatively meaningful attachments. I had an opportunity to try it earlier on and it works perfectly. So there you have it - solutions to all of those silly little "emails as attachments" issues that bug us so regularly in one easy to use post.

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See also:
To save Lotus Notes MIME emails as files (for direct viewing in Outlook Express)
C.DTF is not (necessarily) a virus
A Base64 Decoder and C.DTF
A simple WINMAIL.DAT solution
Fentun

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