[Love Calm Quiet]

Some windows user sent out an announcment & form document in .dat format. Control-clicking in Mail gave me the option to try opening it with Graphic Converter (but GC said, "be gone" ) or with VLC (which gave a good try to play it as an audio file).
I can open it in Text Edit, but it looks as much like Kangi as English when I do.

Anybody got any ideas how I might examine it (or even what MS app produces .dat)?

[Chuckit]

.dat is such a generic extension that it's useless. In all likelihood, there was a screwup somewhere along the line as the e-mail traveled from his computer to yours and that's actually some kind of compressed version of the file. You might try running it through Stuffit to see if it's in some readable format.

[Millennium]

.dat is one of thw most common file extensions out there. Many Windows programs use it for a huge variety of things that are all so different that the file extension alone is pretty much useless for determining what's in it.

This said, I don't know of any program which actually saves its documents with a .dat extension -normally .dat files are only used for temporary storage, or for getting things into, not out of, a program- so it's very likely that your friend sent you the wrong file by mistake. Ask your friend to send it again, and while you're at it, ask what program was used to create it. We may be able to help more once we know that.

[FXOLeary]

You need TNEF's Enough.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8415

In the experience I had dealing with this issue the sender was using QuickMail under Windows. If your sender is also using QuickMail there is a setting (which I no longer remember, sorry) that will prevent this from happening. The setting has to do with how you are stored in the senders QuickMail address book.

I hope this heads you in the right direction. Good luck.

[Love Calm Quiet]

Thanks FXOLeary,

It was a winmail.dat ... and TNEF's Enough was great at enabling me to save each of the (as it turned out) pdfs out of the .dat - which was some sort of pkg I guess.

Worked like a charm! (and easier than trying to explain to the non-power-user of the PC another way to attach a collection of attachments.