I was confused by your answer regarding winmail.dat. The file cannot be opened traditionally, at least to obtain what the receiver believes to be valuable contents. Rather, it's used internally by ...

Q. I received e-mail from a relative that says it is in a winmail.dat file. When I try to open the file, I get a message that says something like: "You are attempting to open a dat file. They are ...

There is software that will open such files — just search for Winmail.dat decoder. And you can open them in Microsoft Word. But you’ll see only a bunch of gibberish.

That could be harmful to the computer and the operating system. Q: I have received an email with an attachment called winmail.dat that I am unable to open. Can you tell me how to access this file?