OpenNTF, you've done it again!

I had another one of those issues yesterday that as a Domino Administrator you don't see all the time, but when you do it usually becomes a hot topic. Case in point, my Director had gotten an email with a winmail.dat attachment. As you may or may not be aware, attachments that are winmail.dat originate from someone using Microsoft Outlook and they have their email set to use some "funky" formatting. Or as Microsoft puts it, "Microsoft Outlook Rich Text Format." (Click this link to read more about it)
So back to my Director. He had opened the email and could not figure out why he cannot open the winmail.dat attachment and view the PowerPoint inside of it. That's when I get called into the office. I explain to him that there isn't much we can do from a Lotus Notes perspective, but he should contact the sender and share with him that he needs to turn off the rich text formatting and resend the message. He was fine with that, but I decided to go a step further and do a search on Notes.Net. Again, this is not something I see all the time, so I figured doing a quick search on the subject would be worth doing. And I am glad I did. I ended up finding a link that took me to a project managed by Julian Robichaux called WinmailExtractor. An awesome tool! In a nutshell, it's a mail in database that you configure on your server for people to forward the message, the database will then convert the winmail.dat with and agent separating out the attachment from the rich text, and mailing the message back to the user with the file attachment as it should be seen. Awesome! I did have an issue with the agent automatically doing the convert however there is a manual process that you can run by clicking on the Actions drop down and selecting "ReProcess Selected Docs"
So the moral to this story is if you're looking for a tool to accomplish something in Lotus Notes/Domino, don't forget to look at OpenNTF.org. Lots of tools for lots of different things and all for free!

"OpenNTF, you've done it again!"....must, of cource, be said in your best "Magoo" voice.