Outlook Tips

Why do my friends tell me I am sending windat attachments to their e-mails when I am not attaching anything.

It is "Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format". This is a text format used by the Microsoft Exchange and Outlook e-mail programs when sending messages formatted as Rich Text Format (RTF. A basic kind of formatting recognised by most word processors).
Microsoft Exchange assumes that the whole world is using nothing but microsoft products and so it thinks that it is sending a message to another Microsoft e-mail client and therefore it uses its own format for sending the message text. Basically it extracts all the formatting information and encodes it in a special TNEF block. It then sends the message in two parts - the text message with the formatting removed and the formatting instructions in the TNEF block. On the receiving side, a Microsoft e-mail client processes the TNEF block and re-formats the message. It is this TNEF block that you are receiving as an attachment in your netscape mail.

Unfortunately, most non-Microsoft e-mail clients (We use Netscape communicator) cannot decipher TNEF blocks. Consequently, when you receive a TNEF-encoded message with a non-Microsoft e-mail client, the TNEF part appears as a long sequence of hexadecimal digits, either in the message itself or as an attached file (usually named WINMAIL.DAT). These WINMAIL.DAT files serve no useful purpose so you do not need to worry about them.

Should you find that you are getting really fed-up with these persistant attachments to your messages you can get in touch with the person sending them and ask them to turn these off for messages sent to you. To do this, they need to double-click on your address and uncheck the box labeled "Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format".