Strange behavior for Outlook pdf attachment arrived in TB

[Calle2013]

Friends

I have this interesting problem. Maybe someone can add some light into it?

A friend sends my brother a xxx.pdf file as an Outlook attachment. My brother receives it in his Thunderbird as an attachment called "Winmail.dat". He then saves it as xxx.pdf on his computer and Adobe cannot open it but complains that it is not a valid pdf file or that it has been corrupted while being sent to an email program.

Ok, so my brother sends it to me. I save the "winimail.dat" file as xxx.pdf and use PDF-Xchange Viewer (latest version) and it opens up just fine. But if I use any of the other free pdf readers I have (Nitro, Adobe, Foxit Reader) they all complain that it is not a valid pdf file! Then I try to safe a copy from within PDF-Xchange Viewer, and it gives me an error "Error saving document to C:\\.....xxx.pdf. Error [PDF Structure 40. Invalid file fomat". So obviously it is a corrupted file.

I know this "winmail.dat" is at least an issue when Outlook users send messages from Outlook created with the rtf format.

I find it interesting that the only program that can open the attachment is PDF-XChange Viewer. Does it meant that the other programs are better at checking the integrity of the file, or what? But I would like to be able to also save the file and not only look at it it PDF-XChange.

I tried to find some program to try to fix the file, but the only one I found (online) said that it had no errors.

I have had it suggested that the problem is that Thunderbird somehow causes this problem, but I am not sure. If I did not download the email into my TB, but went online into the webmail interface and downloaded the attachment (winmail.dat) only from there bypassing TB, and then renaming it xxx.pdf, I still get the same errors.

Any good comments are welcome.

Thanks
Calle

[Calle2013]

A bit more on the subject.

I read about the new PDF-XChange Editor and decided to try that program out also.
Well, when I opened that (corrupt) xxx.pdf file in that Editor, then it opened up fine (which it did in PDF-XChange Viewer also), but when I selected "Save as:", then it saved it just fine (which it did not do in the Viewer). And now I can open the new saved file in any PDF reader!

Strange and amazing! It seems that the new Editor has some magic in it that the viewer does not have.

Thanks for a great new product!

Yours
Calle

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Calle,

Yes the Editor has some more error correction capabilities than the Viewer.

And as for the original problem - simply install the LookOut plug-in for Thunderbird and it will "unpack" any winmail.dat attachment and show you the actual contents of that package as it was intended to be seen.

Regards,
Stefan

[Calle2013]

Thanks, Stefan

That worked. The xxxx.pdf file included in the winmail.dat file shows up as xxxx.txt in the Thunderbird email (together with a couple of other files), but when I save it as xxxx.pdf then it shows the content properly.

Thanks for your good suggestion.

Have a good week!
Calle

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]