End Office and Windows annoyances

What do Outlook, Office, and Windows have in common--other than they're from Microsoft? They can sure be annoying. This week I've got a handful of tips for dealing with some of the hassle--like weird attachments, messy e-mail quotes, confounding file formats, and lost Windows passwords.

Eliminate Annoying Winmail.dat Files

A friend asked me about a weird e-mail attachment he constantly receives from one his friends. "The file's unreadable," he said, "I can't find a program that can view, decode, or convert the thing." He said the file's always the same--winmail.dat.

My friend is using the ancient e-mail tool Eudora and is receiving e-mail from someone using Outlook.

Quick aside: Don't even consider switching to Eudora; it's no longer being sold or even upgraded. There's a new version in the works, but don't hold your breath.

The winmail.dat file is generated from Outlook (or Microsoft Exchange) and it's loaded with Rich Text Format code--italics, bold, and font info. So the file appears as an attachment, but it is useless to my buddy.

If you're in the same boat--or the Outlook user--it's easy enough to turn off the option to send Rich Text Formatted e-mail messages. In Outlook 2003, choose Tools, Options, then select the Mail Format tab, click Internet Format, and choose Convert to Plain Text Format from the menu. Click OK, then OK again to save the change.

It may also make sense to stop using Word as the e-mail editor. Do that by selecting Tools, Options, and clicking the Mail Format tab, then deselecting "Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages."

Fix Outlook's Messy E-Mail Quotes

Did you ever notice how well Outlook can mess up e-mail quotes? You know, the way it takes and causes line breaks to make your messages look like hell?

For the cost of a download, you can make your Outlook e-mails look sharp and, more important, easy to read. The trick is Outlook-QuoteFix, a add-in that automatically takes out the tedium of fixing Outlook's quoting style.

Outlook-QuoteFix works perfectly in Windows XP and with Outlook 98 through 2003; there's a macro that makes it compatible with Outlook 2007.

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