Known issues with Microsoft Office automation.

AutoIt provides a powerful integration and manipulation tool for the MS Windows environment and the WinAPI. Some features of Microsoft's Windows and Office products are proprietary and cannot readily be manipulated. Sometimes workarounds are required. It should be noted that some of these issues change over different versions, resulting in "unexplained" errors or unexpected behavior. This pages is dedicated to identifying those issues, provide explanations and list solutions or workarounds.

Also, please note that since MS Office products function within the Windows environment, the behavior of different components may be mutually interdependent. Simply changing one setting in a specific box, may not have same or desired effect across all platforms and all versions. The uniform use of Windows 10 should reduce these issues.

Microsoft Outlook Email WINMAIL.DAT

The Problem

Email sent using Outlook may be formatted using the Microsoft proprietary TNEF format. Sending the mail appears correct, but the recipient typically receives and email attachment in winmail.dat format. A quick search will indicate just how wide spread this problem is.

The Cause

Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format or TNEF is a proprietary email attachment format used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. An attached file with TNEF encoding is most often named winmail.dat or win.dat, and has a MIME type of Application/MS-TNEF. The official (IANA) media type, however, is application/vnd.ms-tnef. Fronm this page: Wikipedia.org Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format

Look out for

Microsoft uses "aliases" for the TNEF model.