Why does a PDF attachment on an email from a PC end up as a file named winmail.dat when it arrives on my MacBook Pro?
Windows – Can’t open email attachments sent from Windows
attachmentsemailwindows
Related Solutions
To illustrate the point made in the comments, just drag the icon (or the inlined image) from the mail body to wherever you want:
OS X 10.10.3, email 8.2 seem to have fixed the problem. If I go to the header of an email having attachments, I'm offered an iconized menu that allows me to save attachments to the folder of my choice. That seems to work.
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Best Answer
The sender is using the proprietary email client Microsoft Outlook. The entire message is sent in a proprietary format to preserve Rich Text Formatting, according to Microsoft.
A Google search for Winmail.dat will reveal several work arounds to deal with these kinds of files. The simplest, but most annoying, is to ask the sender to resend the email in plain text format. This will prevent the attachments from being bundled into the winmail.dat file.
From Microsoft: