Blog PostDealing with winmail.dat in Linux

Today, I have received an email from a Windows User using Outlook and he was using Rich Mode instead of plain text or html. Thus, when sending attachments, it comes as winmail.dat file. Winmail.dat file is like an archive file contains all the attachments, thus it can be extracted. There is a wonderful tool called ytnef which I used to extract the attachments from the email I got.

A simple how to use:

  1. Save the winmail.dat to your home directory, probably a temp folder in your home directory.
  2. Open the terminal and change the directory to the place where the winmail.dat is saved.
  3. Run the command: ytnef -f . winmail.dat It will save the files in the current directory.