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A friend forwarded a contact list to my gmail account from Outlook (2007 or 2010, not sure which). I can see there is an attachment in gmail but when I save it to my local drive it's just a plain text file containing the text This attachment is a MAPI 1.0 embedded message and is not supported by this mail system.
If I use gmail's "show original message" it contains in part:
This is a multipart message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0016_01CC6656.CE12F030
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
------=_NextPart_000_0016_01CC6656.CE12F030
Content-Type: application/ms-tnef;
name="winmail.dat"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="winmail.dat"
eJ8+Ih0VAQaQCAAEAAAAAAABAAEAAQeQBgAIAAAA5AQAAAAAAADoAAEIgAcAGAAAAElQTS5NaWNy
b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQgABQAEAAAAAAAAAAAAAQkABAACAAAAAAAAAAEDkAYASAgAACgA
--8<---snip---8<--
GUC/9NKH95rABgMA/g8HAAAAAwANNP0/pQ4DAA80/T+lDvAm
------=_NextPart_000_0016_01CC6656.CE12F030--
How do I
- save the attached winmail.dat properly, and
- open the winmail.dat and extract the contact list?
I'm running Windows 7 x64, but have access to an ubuntu linux vmware appliance if needed. I have Outlook 2010, but can't use it to connect directly to gmail as pop3 and imap are blocked by the corporate firewall.
I may have accomplished #1 by dint of a) copying characters between
– matt wilkie – 2011-09-15T19:43:54.453filename="winmail.dat"
and the trailing------=_NextPart
(but not including those bits) and pasting to b) http://webnet77.com/cgi-bin/helpers/base-64.pl, and c) saving the resulting binary file as winmail.dat.1
I've gotten partially through #2 by funneling the winmail.dat created above through Winmail Opener and saving the resulting "Untitled Attachment" to disk. I found winmail opener here (http://techhelp.santovec.us/decode.htm). The ms-tnef section on that page says "If the sender has included any attachments (e.g. pictures, spreadsheets, programs), they will be embedded within the TNEF attachment and not as separate attachments.".
– matt wilkie – 2011-09-15T19:51:00.887Looking at "Untitled Attachment" in a hex editor (Frhed) I can see that yes the contact list is actually embedded in the file. I found an address of my own (that isn't involved with this transaction), but padded with lots of other characters:
– matt wilkie – 2011-09-15T19:59:20.937.S.M.T.P...m.a.p.h.e.w.+.f..i.l.t.e.r@.g.m.a.i.l...c.o.m.....f........+.......n....T.....
the first bit of natural text in the "Untitled Attachment" is
– matt wilkie – 2011-09-15T21:21:11.397IPM.DistList
, a little bit of searching for that confirms that I have an outlook distribution list, SO:what is in IMP.DistList.