If messages are sent using the Exchange family of mail programs
(includes Windows Messaging or Outlook97/98/2000+) and the option to use
Rich Text Format is selected, it puts the RTF message (and any attached
files) in an attachment called WINMAIL.DAT (application/ms-tnef). But
this attachment is useless to most other mail programs. In some mail
programs (e.g. Outlook Express), the attachment won't even be visible.

The Exchange user can turn off the RTF option for messages to selected
recipients. Note that if sending via an Exchange server, the Exchange
server administrator may be overriding the mail client settings. In
this case, the administrator will need to make changes on the server.
In some cases, the Exchange server actually removes the attachments to
some recipients.

For additional information, see the MS-TNEF WINMAIL.DAT Attachments
section of
Decoding Internet Attachments - A Tutorial
http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_san...de.htm#ms-tnef
At the above link is information on several utilities that can be used
to recover the attachment if the sender can't or won't resend it in
plain text (or HTML) mode.


--

Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm


"Dinesh M" wrote in message
...
I have a strange problem and have not been able to find a good solution
to
this problem. I have OE 6 on my machine while my friends and others
have
Outlook 2003 and above on their machine. It happens that i get proper
rich
text messages from few of them while from others i get messages in
Plain
Text. Can any1 help or seen this? This is also the problem with
attachments i
sometimes do get the ones sent from Outlook.