Winmail.dat - Stuck Between MS Wrongdoings and Apple's Principles

Posted this on discussion.apple.com and I guess they took exception to it and removed it... Just looking for insight.

I have been a PC user for all of my life (currently 40+), I went all in around November 2011. My most stable mabook pro has been fun and essentially hardware problem free since I got it. However, I find myself daily caught in the struggle of MS doing what they want and Apple refusing to include simple functionality to allow their users to function in a professional environment without considereable headaches. Switching from PC to mac has been interesting. I am pretty good at tinkering and working with new things. There are many things that the mac does differently and I have either embraced the mac way or found ways to make things work the way I was used to.

The only road block I have been unable to surpass is the dreaded winmail.dat email attachments. I have laboriously tried to come up with fixes, alternatives and work arounds to allow me to collaborate with my Windows and Outlook based clients seamlessly. Before anyone replies with the mantra of Microsoft is doing it wrong, Apple shouldn't have to include errors in their code to appease PC users, etc. I acknowledge that Outlook uses non-industry standard TNEF formatting that is causing the problem. I acknowledge that Apple refuses to include the support to allow these files to be opened by their maill app and iOS devises. I only ask that people (Apple's development people, mostly) realize that the mac share of the market is very small and their users have to swim in the main pool.

Some of my clients are easy to work with and they will gladly make minor adjustments to their email settings to prevent the winmail.dat files from occurring. Others... not so much. Many of those "Others" represent a significant part of my company's income so I am not inclined to tell them to take a hike. I am forced to some how work around these Outlook and Exchange issues myself. Many days I spend a considerable amount of time contorting myself infront of the computer screen simply trying to open email attachments, accept meeting invites and doing mundain things in many steps and the bottom line is that I shouldn't have to... Again, I am not saying this is Apple's fault

I have used TNEF's Enough which allows me to drop the winmail.dat attachment in it to open the contents. That works for many of the problems when I am at my macbook and have access to it. However, that does not appear to handle Outlook meeting requests and does not help me when I get the culprits on my iOS devices. I have Parallels running Windows with an MS version of Outlook on it to allow me to open attachments with meeting requests on my mac, but then I can't get them to sync well without playing games with my iCloud calendars. I have even resorted to using the Gmail web interface which does a better job of syncing with iCloud since our firm uses the gmail business apps service for our mail system

I know Apple shouldn't have to and most likely won't do anything. Even moreso, I know that MS won't do anything to prevent their software from sending emails using the TNEF. Maybe this is just a rant with no purpose... I know I am not alone. I just wish Apple could put the "principle" aside to include the ability to open these in the future as a native function of Mail and iOS devices. Am I alone? Has anyone else found themselves in the same situation and found better methods of dealing?