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Suggestion
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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1
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12
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NOTE: This suggestion is for JIRA Service Desk Server. Using JIRA Service Desk Cloud? See the corresponding suggestion.
Summary
Outlook is a very common email client. If a sender of an email has TNEF enabled, the email sent (and received by the mail handler) will be TNEF-encoded
Quoting from Outlooks KB: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/290809
A TNEF-encoded message contains a plain text version of the message, and a binary attachment that "packages" various other parts of the original message. In most cases, the binary attachment is named Winmail.dat, and may include the following information:
- The formatted text version of the message (for example, font information and colors).
- OLE objects (for example, embedded pictures and embedded Microsoft Office documents).
- Special Outlook features (for example, custom forms, voting buttons, and meeting requests).
- Regular file attachments that were added to the original message.
The following is quoted from the same article above as well
Sending and Receiving Concerns
When an e-mail client that does not understand TNEF receives a message that contains TNEF information, the following are the three common results:
- The plain text version of the message is received and it contains an attachment named Winmail.dat. The Winmail.dat attachment does not contain any useful information when you open it because it is in the special TNEF format.
- Note: Some users have reported receiving a Win.dat attachment.
This is exactly what is happening to JSD mail handler at the moment. If a user sends an email with attachment using Outlook with TNEF enabled, the message is added to the ticket just fine, but Winmail.dat will be attached to the ticket, instead of the original intended attachment
Suggestion
Have the mail handler understand TNEF to decode Winmail.dat and attach the proper attachment
- relates to
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- Gathering Interest
- links to
[JSDSERVER-4383] Mail Handler to understand TNEF, decode winmail.dat and attach the proper attachment to email requests
We got an instance of this today, customer example email contained no mime-encoded attachments other than winmail.dat.
Root cause of this is simple: it's a client problem; they can send mail encoded within winmail.dat just fine so long as they don't need to talk to the rest of the world. If they do need this edge case 
the sender organisation needs to disable the MS proprietary encoding, and get with the open standard mime format, providing a HTML version complete with all inline images, etc. Then, in non-MS environments, the winmail.dat file will be redundant, and can (as ever) just be ignored. The following should show the way (we don't use exchange but believe it will help)
- http://msexchangeguru.com/2013/10/09/winmail/
- https://www.slipstick.com/problems/outlook-is-sending-winmail-dat-attachments/
JIRA has never decoded TNEF so far, I doubt JSD would do that specifically, though who can say.
We are running the Jira Service Desk and got this winmail.dat issue very often, because Customers are sending additional infos in Excel or Word or PDF with the their e-mails. The suggestions of the Microsoft acticle does not really help, because
- we would have to tell all our customers not to send richtext formatted e-mails and whenever we receive an e-mail with winmail.dat we would have to ask them to resend.
- I have forwarded an e-mail with attachments that I have received in my Outlook as text-only e-mail to Jira and this has been received with winmail.dat too. So if the original sender has choosen richtext format, Outlook will not change this anymore.
I was able to work-around this issue by adding a remote domain in the exchange config for *.atlassian.net. This works well for O365.
https://www.alitajran.com/fix-winmail-dat-attachment-in-office-365/