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Enable TNEF on Linux Servers

Tags: mailoutlookTNEFwinmail

Scenario:

In Linux servers sometimes we need to install TNEF, let me explain the scenario, when a mail is received from Microsoft Outlook that encoded using RTF (Rich Text Format), you may see an attachment winmail.dat that can’t be viewed on Webmail running on Linux platform by default. A sample error is given below.

Warning: tnef is not installed or not executable. you can't view winmail.dat attachments in the email module

What is TNEF?

TNEF (Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format) 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

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241538

Installation

TNEF need to be complied and installed manually. The steps are given below,

 Step 1 : Get the download link of latest TNEF release from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tnef/files/latest/download

 Step 2 : Strip the download link as follows http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tnef/tnef/tnef-1.4.9.tar.gz

 Step 3 : Download and install TNEF

# cd /usr/local/src

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tnef/tnef/tnef-1.4.9.tar.gz

# tar -xzf tnef-1.4.9.tar.gz

# cd tnef-1.4.9

# ./configure

# make

# make install

Step 4 : Check installation

# tnef -V
tnef 1.4.9
Copyright (C) 1999-2011 by Mark Simpson
Copyright (C) 1997 by Thomas Boll (original code)
tnef comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of tnef under the terms of the GNU General
Public License. For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING

Category : Howtos, Linux, Windows