Mac mail cannot read email from outlook 2007

gizzzo · Apr 30, 2009

Email recipients using Mac Mail have been reporting that when they get email from me (from Outlook2007 in the PC), it would include all the tags. Also happens when I send as RTF. Plain text is fine.

So I did an experiment and since I am a mac user too, I tested it myself on my mac mail. Test scenario is this:

1. I send email from Outlook2007 (PC) using HTML as default.
2. I open with Macmail, I get garbage. (see below and/or attached file for illustration.)
3. I open same email on Entourage, it's fine.
4. I open same email on webmail, it's fine.
everyone else receiving the email except for mac mail users are fine.

Why is this happening only in Macmail? What's the solution?

note: content of email as viewed form macmail (warning: it's long and full of tags):
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\fromhtml1 \fbidis \deff0{\fonttbl

{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}

{\f1\fmodern Courier New;}

{\f2\fnil\fcharset2 Symbol;}

{\f3\fmodern\fcharset0 Courier New;}}

{\colortbl\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green0\blue255;}

\uc1\pard\plain\deftab360 \f0\fs24

{\*\htmltag19 <html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns

="urn:schemas-microsoft-com

ffice

ffice" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com

ffice:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">}

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag34 <head>}

{\*\htmltag1 \par }

{\*\htmltag1 \par }

{\*\htmltag161 <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered medium)">}

{\*\htmltag1 \par }

{\*\htmltag241 <style>}

{\*\htmltag241 \par <!--\par /* Font Definitions */\par @font-face\par \tab \{font-family:"Cambria Math";\par \tab panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;\}\par @font-face\par \tab \{font-family:Calibri;\par \tab panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;\}\par /* Style Definitions */\par p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal\par \tab \{margin:0in;\par \tab margin-bottom:.0001pt;\par \tab font-size:11.0pt;\par \tab font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";\}\par a:link, span.MsoHyperlink\par \tab \{mso-style-priority:99;\par \tab color:blue;\par \tab text-decoration:underline;\}\par a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed\par \tab \{mso-style-priority:99;\par \tab color

urple;\par \tab text-decoration:underline;\}\par span.EmailStyle17\par \tab \{mso-style-type

ersonal-compose;\par \tab font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";\par \tab color:windowtext;\}\par .MsoChpDefault\par \tab \{mso-style-type:export-only;\par \tab font-size:10.0pt;\}\par @page Section1\par \tab \{size:8.5in 11.0in;\par \tab margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;\}\par div.Section1\par \tab \{page:Section1;\}\par -->\par }

{\*\htmltag249 </style>}

{\*\htmltag1 \par }

{\*\htmltag241 }

{\*\htmltag241 }

{\*\htmltag1 \par }

{\*\htmltag41 </head>}

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag50 <body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple>}\htmlrtf \lang1033 \htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag96 <div class=Section1>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag64 <p class=MsoNormal>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0 Testing: outlook 2007

{\*\htmltag84 }\htmlrtf \'96\htmlrtf0 Macmail compatibility

{\*\htmltag244 <o

>}

{\*\htmltag252 </o

>}\htmlrtf\par}\htmlrtf0

\htmlrtf \par

\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag72 </p>}

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag64 <p class=MsoNormal>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag244 <o

>}

{\*\htmltag84 }\htmlrtf \'a0\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag252 </o

>}\htmlrtf\par}\htmlrtf0

\htmlrtf \par

\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag72 </p>}

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag64 <p class=MsoNormal>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0 Scenario: sending new email html format, AV scanning of

{\*\htmltag4 \par }\htmlrtf \htmlrtf0 outgoing email disabled

{\*\htmltag244 <o

>}

{\*\htmltag252 </o

>}\htmlrtf\par}\htmlrtf0

\htmlrtf \par

\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag72 </p>}

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag64 <p class=MsoNormal>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag244 <o

>}

{\*\htmltag84 }\htmlrtf \'a0\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag252 </o

>}\htmlrtf\par}\htmlrtf0

\htmlrtf \par

\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag72 </p>}

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag64 <p class=MsoNormal>}\htmlrtf {\htmlrtf0 Please feedback what appears in your email when u read this.

{\*\htmltag4 \par }\htmlrtf \htmlrtf0 thanks

{\*\htmltag244 <o

>}

{\*\htmltag252 </o

>}\htmlrtf\par}\htmlrtf0

\htmlrtf \par

\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag72 </p>}

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag104 </div>}\htmlrtf }\htmlrtf0

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag0 \par }

{\*\htmltag58 </body>}

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag2 \par }

{\*\htmltag27 </html>}

{\*\htmltag3 \par }}

MisterMe · Apr 30, 2009

gizzzo said:
Email recipients using Mac Mail have been reporting that when they get email from me (from Outlook2007 in the PC), it would include all the tags. Also happens when I send as RTF. Plain text is fine.

So I did an experiment and since I am a mac user too, I tested it myself on my mac mail. Test scenario is this:

1. I send email from Outlook2007 (PC) using HTML as default.
...

OK, so what are you saying all of those hash codes represent? You talk about HTML and RTF. What you have there is clearly not HTML. According to the hash codes, its format is RTF converted from HTML.

Do you have an example of a real message where this is an issue?

gizzzo · Apr 30, 2009

MisterMe said:
OK, so what are you saying all of those hash codes represent? You talk about HTML and RTF. What you have there is clearly not HTML. According to the hash codes, its format is RTF converted from HTML.

Do you have an example of a real message where this is an issue?

Regarding your first question, I wondered about that too because outgoing email is set to html as default in my outlook2007. i also checked options before sending it out to make sure it is set to html and it is set to html so I have no idea why it does look like rtf.

but the question is why does it occur only in mac mail client? entourage may have been a bad example since it is an microsoft product, but our webmail, google and
other 3rd party clients do not have this problem. So after having eliminated the possibilities, it seems that mac mail is the problem.

On your 2nd question: i included attachments showing screenshots of the original message and how it looks in mac mail, entourage and our webmail client.

Is there anything I can provide to help diagnose the problem?

note: I have asked the outlook newsgroups but no solution there so far.

I hope mac users would have a solution since it only happens to macmail.

thanks for the help.

dsnort · Apr 30, 2009

I don't know if it's the same thing, but recently I started having issues with emails received from colleagues using the latest version of Outlook. All I would was the header and an attachment labeled winmail.dat. Turns out it's a new behavior of Outlook, (Yaaaay Microsoft ), you can turn it off in the settings, but I don't know how, here's a link that might help.

http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm

There's an app you can buy, ( gads I really love M$ ), called "Letter Opener". It installs to your Mac and opens these files.

gizzzo · Apr 30, 2009

dsnort said:
I don't know if it's the same thing, but recently I started having issues with emails received from colleagues using the latest version of Outlook. All I would was the header and an attachment labeled winmail.dat. Turns out it's a new behavior of Outlook, (Yaaaay Microsoft ), you can turn it off in the settings, but I don't know how, here's a link that might help.

http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~jbenson/resource/winmail.htm

There's an app you can buy, ( gads I really love M$ ), called "Letter Opener". It installs to your Mac and opens these files.

Thanks for the response. The problem is not with the winmail.dat or not being able to read other attachments. It's the body of the email. Even when I send a single letter or a single word, mac mail sees all the tags.

I thought it was the AV possibly taking out parsing information on outgoing emails but I have uninstalled that and still the problem persist. I even had to go to the email server itself to check the format before any client downloaded the email and it is intact, i.e. readable. Other email clients could read. It's just mac mail.

MisterMe · Apr 30, 2009

gizzzo said:
Thanks for the response. The problem is not with the winmail.dat or not being able to read other attachments. It's the body of the email. Even when I send a single letter or a single word, mac mail sees all the tags.

I thought it was the AV possibly taking out parsing information on outgoing emails but I have uninstalled that and still the problem persist. I even had to go to the email server itself to check the format before any client downloaded the email and it is intact, i.e. readable. Other email clients could read. It's just mac mail.

You didn't read or didn't understand the information on the linked webpage. And what do you mean by "other email clients"?

gizzzo · Apr 30, 2009

MisterMe said:
You didn't read or didn't understand the information on the linked webpage. And what do you mean by "other email clients"?

I did read it and maybe I understood it differently but it says there the problem is with an attached file called winmail.dat. There is no attached file whatsoever when I try to read the message in mac mail or any other client I used. The only relation is with email formating that's proprietary with outlook. We all know that. But it still doesn't answer the question why it only happens with macmail and not the other email clients I tested. And with other email clients, I mean gmail, eudora, entourage, our webmail (kerio). Also did I mention that I also accessed the email in the email server to see if it was formatted as such but no. My email admin used eudora to access the email also and he had no problems.

Maybe you should read the link carefully yourself.

MisterMe · Apr 30, 2009

gizzzo said:
...

Maybe you should read the link carefully yourself.

I did read it. The link makes it clear that the winmail.dat file is attached to all Outlook messages. It is normally an invisible file that tells the email client how to format the message. The link also made it clear that Microsoft has changed the winmail.dat which breaks some email clients. It gives you some workarounds to resolve the issue.

danny_w · Apr 30, 2009

MisterMe said:
I did read it. The link makes it clear that the winmail.dat file is attached to all Outlook messages. It is normally an invisible file that tells the email client how to format the message. The link also made it clear that Microsoft has changed the winmail.dat which breaks some email clients. It gives you some workarounds to resolve the issue.

Yes, but it is referring to Outlook 97 and 2000. The same may be true of 2007, but it can't be proved by this link.

plinden · Apr 30, 2009

The OP's problem isn't winmail.dat ... that's been around for years. I've received unreadable email from Outlook users for years. You don't have to buy anything to read it. I use http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/ - the developer asks for donations but it's free.

Anyway, the OP's problem seems to be that Mail is parsing the RTF component of whatever mail he's sending. I don't have Outlook 2007 to test this, but I am able to read mail sent from Entourage 2008 in Apple Mail.

OP, can you send an email from your Outlook, then in Mail, select View -> Message -> Raw Source, and post the contents? You can remove the identifying header information, but make sure you include the Content-Type headers.

Edit: here's an example from Entourage 2008

Code:

Thread-Topic: Test
Thread-Index: AcnJtS0eQENetZkurEGf0eFxcLmJhQ==
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
	boundary="B_3323930435_57406093"

> This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

--B_3323930435_57406093
Content-type: text/plain;
	charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

        What does this look like?

--B_3323930435_57406093
Content-type: text/html;
	charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Test</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<FONT FACE=3D"Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE=3D'font-size:11pt=
'>        What <B><I>does </I></B>this lo=
ok like?</SPAN></FONT>
</BODY>
</HTML>


--B_3323930435_57406093--

gizzzo · Apr 30, 2009

plinden said:
The OP's problem isn't winmail.dat ... that's been around for years. I've received unreadable email from Outlook users for years. You don't have to buy anything to read it. I use http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/ - the developer asks for donations but it's free.

Anyway, the OP's problem seems to be that Mail is parsing the RTF component of whatever mail he's sending. I don't have Outlook 2007 to test this, but I am able to read mail sent from Entourage 2008 in Apple Mail.

OP, can you send an email from your Outlook, then in Mail, select View -> Message -> Raw Source, and post the contents? You can remove the identifying header information, but make sure you include the Content-Type headers.

Edit: here's an example from Entourage 2008

Code:

Thread-Topic: Test Thread-Index: AcnJtS0eQENetZkurEGf0eFxcLmJhQ== Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="B_3323930435_57406093" > This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. --B_3323930435_57406093 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit What does this look like? --B_3323930435_57406093 Content-type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Test</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <FONT FACE=3D"Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE=3D'font-size:11pt= '> What <B><I>does </I></B>this lo= ok like?</SPAN></FONT> </BODY> </HTML> --B_3323930435_57406093--

Thanks for all the help. As requested, here's the source of the email I used for my little not very scientific experiment:

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns

="urn:schemas-microsoft-com

ffice

ffice" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com

ffice:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered medium)">
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Calibri;
panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{mso-style-priority:99;
color

urple;
text-decoration:underline;}
span.EmailStyle17
{mso-style-type

ersonal-compose;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:windowtext;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
font-size:10.0pt;}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>

</head>

<body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal>Testing: outlook 2007 – Macmail compatibility<o

></o

></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><o

> </o

></p>

<p class=MsoNormal>Scenario: sending new email html format, AV scanning of
outgoing email disabled<o

></o

></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><o

> </o

></p>

<p class=MsoNormal>Please feedback what appears in your email when u read this.
thanks<o

></o

></p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

plinden · Apr 30, 2009

Is that all there is? Or are you still editing out bits of the email?

If you look at my example, you'll see that the main content-type is "multipart/alternative" - this tells the email client that there are multiple parts to the email, but since it's "multipart/alternative", only one part should be displayed ... it's up to the client to decide what's the best part.

What you posted doesn't contain any email headers, so I don't know what the email is reporting for the content type. Considering that what you posted is just html (which displays correctly for me), it would likely be "text/html", but it's very unlikely that even Outlook would send just html - there's usually a "text/plain" part.

MisterMe · Apr 30, 2009

plinden said:
The OP's problem isn't winmail.dat ... that's been around for years. I've received unreadable email from Outlook users for years. You don't have to buy anything to read it. I use http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/ - the developer asks for donations but it's free.

...

TNEF's Enough has been superseded by Letter Opener. Since the older version is still available, no harm is done by trying TNEF's Enough first.

gizzzo · May 3, 2009

plinden said:
Is that all there is? Or are you still editing out bits of the email?

If you look at my example, you'll see that the main content-type is "multipart/alternative" - this tells the email client that there are multiple parts to the email, but since it's "multipart/alternative", only one part should be displayed ... it's up to the client to decide what's the best part.

What you posted doesn't contain any email headers, so I don't know what the email is reporting for the content type. Considering that what you posted is just html (which displays correctly for me), it would likely be "text/html", but it's very unlikely that even Outlook would send just html - there's usually a "text/plain" part.

Hi I did not edit out bits of the email. Unless there's another way, I copy-pasted all. Here's what I did: open sent email>other actions>view source>copy>paste. Is there another way to do this?

gizzzo · May 4, 2009

gizzzo said:
Hi I did not edit out bits of the email. Unless there's another way, I copy-pasted all. Here's what I did: open sent email>other actions>view source>copy>paste. Is there another way to do this?

anything else i need to check? still at a loss at diagnosis and solution here. thanks

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