If you are using an email client besides Outlook (gasp!), you have most likely run into the attachment winmail.dat. Supposedly this can be prevented on the client side by sending mail in plain text; however, this doesn’t appear to work with attachments. We ran across a cool utility at Fentun that will extract attachments out of winmail.dat files. The beautiful thing is that it runs on both Windows and on Linux. In fact, we ran the Linux binary to extract an MS Word attachment, and opened it without incident in AbiWord. There is a web-based service to extract winmail.dat files here.