plainfolder → Mail → WINMAIL
Open winmail.dat and get the attachments out
Somebody sent you a file called winmail.dat and your mail program has no idea what it is. Drop it here — the real attachments are inside.
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What a winmail.dat file is
winmail.dat is not a document. It is a container Outlook sometimes wraps a message in, with the attachments and formatting packed inside. Mail programs that do not speak Microsoft's format hand you the container itself, which is why it looks like one useless file.
It always happens at the wrong moment: the invoice, the contract, the photos — all of them are in there, and nothing will open it. Here the container is unpacked in the page, and you get the files that were meant for you.
What you can do here
Read and searchOpen the file, search by subject, address or text, filter by year, sender and attachment type.
Take things outSave every attachment as one zip, or the messages themselves as separate files.
Keep a copyCSV, XLSX, ZIP, EML, MBOX, PDF, HTML, TXT, JSON — whichever format outlives the one you have.
Convert winmail.dat to something else
Questions
- Where does this file come from?
- From Outlook. When it sends a message in its own rich format to a program that does not understand it, everything gets packed into a single winmail.dat.
- Do I need Outlook to open it?
- No. The container is read here, in the browser, on any operating system.
- Is the file uploaded anywhere?
- No. It is read on your own computer and never sent to a server.
- Does this work inside a mail archive too?
- Yes. When you open an mbox, pst or eml file here, any winmail.dat inside it is unpacked automatically and you see the real attachments instead of the container.