TNEF's Enough :: FAQ

Q: What is the deal with winmail.dat files anyway?

The files are usually received by SMTP based e-mail programs from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook users. The SMTP based e-mail program will usually either receive a MIME attachment named "winmail.dat" or a MIME attachment with the type "application/ms-tnef."

The file is a rich text (or MAPI) message that is sent from Outlook to Exchange. When Exchange sends the message to an outside server it writes the MAPI message as a MIME attachment. The unfortunate side effect of this plan is that if the Outlook user has someone in their address book as a person who can receive "Rich Text" then the user will receive the TNEF file whether the user uses Outlook or not.

Q: Why would there be a problem or error opening a file?

If you open a file with TNEF's Enough and receive an error the reason could be one of many. The most obvious is that the file is not a TNEF file. For example, opening a .SIT file with the application would give you this error.

Another possibility is that the file is a TNEF file but is currently encoded in another format. For example, if someone received an e-mail with a TNEF file and forwarded it to you and your e-mail program did not decode the encoding used by the sender's e-mail program then the TNEF file could still be encoded. There is no easy way to figure out if your file is encoded in a format like BinHex, Base64 or UUEncoding (three common encoding methods used in e-mails) but a common solution can be to open the file with Stuffit Expander first. Stuffit Expander can often figure out these encodings and can return the file to the TNEF format for TNEF's Enough.

The last possibility is that the TNEF file is damaged. If the file is sent through an e-mail system or received by an e-mail program that doesn't now how to deal with these files than the file can become corrupt and TNEF's Enough will not be able to open it. If this is the case then there is nothing that TNEF's Enough can do to recover the embedded files.

Q: What's the deal with the interface?

When you open a TNEF file a window appears with a tab to display the files embedded in the TNEF file (if any exist) and a tab to display the attributes of the TNEF file. The TNEF file format contains many attributes that describe the original message. The attribute list lets you look at these non-file attributes.

Q: What is the deal with the preferences?

There are two options for opening files with TNEF's Enough based on two different Mac OS technologies. The first option is to open a file through the interface of the application by choosing "Open..." under the file menu or hitting Command-O and then using the dialog to select the file.

The other option is to use drag and drop a file on TNEF's Enough icon either in the Finder or in the Dock. The preferences allow you to specify if automatic expanding of embedded files happens with either option. Once automatic expanding is selected you can specify where the files are saved and how they are saved.

Q: What kind of AppleScript support is there?

Currently TNEF's Enough supports only a few AppleScript commands which allow you to launch the program, open files and quit the application. When you send an open command with AppleScript you are sending the same command that the Finder sends when you drag and drop a file on the TNEF's Enough icon. Because of this, you can set the preferences for dragged and dropped files and automate expanding of files when using AppleScript.

Q: Can I use TNEF's Enough from the command line or Terminal?

There is no direct support for command line execution (in the UNIX traditional sense of standard inputs/outputs, etc.) but with the "open" command line tool you can send an open command (aka. open Apple Event) to TNEF's Enough. If you have the preferences for drag and drop opening (a "drag and drop" on an application is the Finder sending an open Apple Event) of files set to automatic expanding then the embedded files will be automatically expanded. Here's a sample:

open -a "TNEF's Enough" winmail.dat

Because TNEF's Enough uses the Apple preferences system you can also take advantage of the "defaults" command line tool to set values in the preferences file. For example, if you wish to have TNEF's Enough behave one way for true drag and drop you can set that in the preferences of the application and use the "defaults" command line tool to set another option for command line use and then return the original values. The first command example will set the automatic expanding of Apple Events to true (1) and the second command will turn the automatic expanding off (0).

defaults write com.joshjacob.TNEFsEnough AppleEventAuto 1 defaults write com.joshjacob.TNEFsEnough AppleEventAuto 0

Q: Where are the long file names for embedded files?

The TNEF file format contains an attribute which contains the name of the embedded file. Currently this is where TNEF's Enough gets the name of the embedded file. Some TNEF files also contain additional attributes which contain a data structure that has the long file name of the embedded file. Until TNEF's Enough can determine the format of this data structure you can use the attributes tab to look at the value of this attribute and copy the long file name.

Question Submission

To submit a support question on TNEF's Enough, fill out the following information: