[MlMt] winmail.dat attachments

[Bill Cole]

On 11 Sep 2015, at 2:26, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 11 Sep 2015, at 7:20, Bill Cole wrote:
>
>> On 10 Sep 2015, at 16:48, David Vereschagin wrote:
>>
>>> My MailMate used to expand winmail.dat attachments from Outlook 
>>> users. Since the beginning of this month it's no longer doing so. 
>>> The only thing I can think of is that some preference or key binding 
>>> has been changed.
>>>
>>> I can't find a setting to control for this in the preferences. Is 
>>> there a key binding that I can use reinstate the old behaviour?
>
> I recall fixing a bug related to the `winmail.dat` handling. 
> Apparently it had been broken for quite some time. Try holding down 
> ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” to get the latest test release. The 
> only problem is that what Bill describes in his reply doesn't really 
> ring a bell.

I can demo it. This is with r5122, but whatever I was running last night 
had the same issue, as does tnef built by MacPorts:

silverclam:~ dad$ 
/Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/tnef --unix-paths 
--list Winmail.dat
silverclam:~ dad$  echo $?
0
silverclam:~ dad$ 
/Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/tnef --unix-paths 
--list --save-body Winmail.dat
message.rtf	|	message.rtf
silverclam:~ dad$ ls -l message.rtf
ls: message.rtf: No such file or directory
silverclam:~ dad$ 
/Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/tnef --unix-paths 
--save-body Winmail.dat
silverclam:~ dad$ ls -l message.rtf
-rw-r--r--  1 dad  staff  40759 Sep 11 08:58 message.rtf
silverclam:~ dad$


I THINK the root of the problem in the tnef code is in the use of a 
global bitfield used for the command line flags declared as a (signed) 
int and checked with compiler macros. It's been too long since I've 
worked with C regularly for me to spot the bug, but it's definitely 
there. Running dtruss on the tnef run shows no sign of writing anything 
without --save-body argument.

Of course the root of the problem is that the TNEF format is a 
semi-secret abomination which isn't even reliably compatible between all 
of the MS programs that write it, so breakage involving it is never 
really a surprise...

> This means there might be another problem.

Yes. An oddity I see is that in MM and the Finder all ".dat" files show 
up with a VLC icon, because apparently anything can be a media file...


> Note that you need to use “Message ▸ Reset...” on any emails 
> already fetched (in order to trigger a new attempt to auto-expand the 
> attachment).

No success. I do get your explanatory text as shown in the attached 
screenshot.

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