Chris Linfoot | Fentun

Thursday, 7. July 2005

Fentun

This post is about extracting attachments from C.DAT, WINMAIL.DAT or ATT0001.DAT sent to you by Outlook users who mistakenly believe that you also use Outlook. See this earlier post for a slightly longer description of the background.

C.DAT is a popular search term at this site and readers regularly click through to Fentun and WMDecode, both of which are reported to be able to extract attachments from C.DAT.

As I have had occasion to use Fentun recently, I am providing here a description of how you can use it relatively painlessly. This technique will work for any email client where C.DAT shows up in an in-box.

Follow these three easy steps.

1. Get Fentun

Go to Fentun's Home Page and download Fentun (it says "Fentun for Windows '95", but it works on 95 and any later Windows version *). Place Fentun in a folder on your HDD.

2. Save C.DAT to the same folder

Open the email containing C.DAT, WINMAIL.DAT or ATT0001.DAT and save the attachment to the same folder as Fentun on your HDD. You should now see a folder a little like this:

Fentun and C.DAT in a folder

3. Open C.DAT with Fentun (drag and drop)

If you just try and run Fentun by double clicking the Fentun icon, nothing will happen. It is designed to work with a single command line parameter, namely the name of the file being processed. However, you don't need to use a command prompt to make this happen. Drag and drop works too.

Click and drag the C.DAT (or whatever) file and drop it onto Fentun. You should now see this:

Fentun

Select the file or files (shift click for multiple files) that you want to extract ** and click Extract.

That's all. You're done.

* Aside: there is also a Linux version.
** Note: If no files are listed in Fentun after the drag and drop, no files were attached to the original message. C.DAT is always the result of sending TNEF email to a non-Outlook client even where no attachments are carried with it. In this case it contains only a rich text version of the email message itself.

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