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HTML formatted e-mail to self being returned in plain text + winmail.dat file
Using Outlook 2016, I create an e-mail in HTML format and send it to myselt for testing how it displays on a smart phone.
When I use a browser to acesss my mail via Xfinity mail, I sometimes seee the following.
- In "sent" mail I see the mail formatted exactly as I composed it in Outlook.
- In my "inbox" I sometimes see the mail in plain text plus a winmail.dat file.
What is odd about this is if access the mail through Outlook (via IMAP), Outlook can read it and format it correctly. But if I access the mail on an iPhone (again via IMAP) I see the plain text plus the winmail.dat file that I see via the browser, which is or course useless.
It seems that somewhere in the round trip between sending and receiving the e-mail some setting is getting canged that causes the IMAP server to return the wrong format. And BTW, if you examine the e-mail in the "inbox", it looks like it is served up as an .rtf format.
This suggests that the mail message is correctly formatted on the backend, but is being incorrectly served up to the browser interface and the iPhone. Outlook can read it becasue the format being served up is one created and understood by Outlook.
And BTW, this is due to some recent change. It was working just fine the two weeks before Thanksgiving.
Note: This seems specific to Outlook. If I compose the same message in the Xfinity web e-mail interface and send it to myself, it appears correctly formatted when viewed in the inbox and when viewed on an iPhone.
BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
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25.9K Messages
3 years ago
Change the format in Outlook from RTF to HTML, or to plain text. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-email-message-formats-affect-internet-email-messages-in-outlook-3b2c0536-c1c0-1d68-19f0-8cae13c26722.
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fixit_40beb7
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19 Messages
3 years ago
I am aware of the info in the link you posted. As indicated in the header of the original post, the email in question is in HTML. This e-mail is normally sent to 50 or more recipients, some of whom are reading it on smarrphones, some on PCs using a browser or with some other mail reader such as Outlook. As far as I know, the target audience has never had a problem until recently. Composing these emails in HTML with Outlook has worked flawlessly for over two or more years until about the last week of November 2021 when something changed, either in Outlook or the Xfinity backend. Hard to tell which. What makes this worse is that most messages composed in HTML do not exhibit this behavior, making it difficult to create test cases. But here's one way:
Using Outlook connected to a comcast.net account, create a simple one-line HTML message reading
Red Test Message
with the subject reading "Red Test Message" and send it to yourself so you can view it in both the Xfinity "sent' and "inbox folders, In this case it should look the same in both views.
Then in Outlook in the "Sent" folder, open the message you just sent, remove the forwarding infomation from the beginning of the message and send it to yourself again. This message should have "FW: Red Test Message" as the subject. This time the view of the message in the Xfinity "sent" and "inbox" folders will differ. The "inbox" view will show as plain text plus a winmail.dar file. If you happen to be able to read this message on an iPhone, it will show as it the same way.
So the act of forwarding a properly formatted message, makes some change that causes the received e-mail to be rendered in an unexpected way. Not surprisingly, Outlook will render the message correctly when the message is viewed that way,
Note: This behavior may be highly dependent on the version of Outlook you are using. I am using Outlook 2016 installed on my PC. You may find this works w/o a problem with other versions.
Regardless. one would expect, if a mail is sent to oneself, you would get the same rendering in both "sent" and "inbox" folders.
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BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
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25.9K Messages
3 years ago
All I can tell you is that the only source I know of for "winmail.dat" files in email is MS Outlook and MS Exchange, which generate the file to support Microsoft's proprietary RTF format. I've never heard of anything else creating that file.
Could you describe in a bit more detail how you are testing the appearance of messages in the webmail "sent" and "inbox" folders? I'm uncertain where these messages were composed and how they got into the two folders. Just now saw your update.
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BruceW
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25.9K Messages
3 years ago
Are you sending through smtp.comcast.net to your @comcast.net email address, or does the mail follow a different path?
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BruceW
Gold Problem Solver
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25.9K Messages
3 years ago
When using webmail's HTML Compose and its View Source function, the resulting email appears to contain both a plain text ("Content-Type: text/plain") version and an HTML version of the message I wrote. Is that what you mean?
In the testing I've done with messages composed in webmail and sent to myself, the header portion of the message that arrives in the Inbox is much larger than the one in Sent, but the bodies of the Inbox and Sent messages are identical.
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tblfpc
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1 Message
3 years ago
I am having a similar issue. I am receiving winmail.dat attachments on my macbook pro and iphone, even though my office is trying to send me .pdf attachments. They use Microsoft Outlook and an exchange server. I get .pdf attachments just fine from other senders - just not my office. This issue has been ongoing since last spring.
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