An update to my Thunderbird TNEF script for opening winmail.dat

Back in July I blogged about Opening winmail.dat (TNEF) files in Thunderbird (on Ubuntu). Well a colleague at work has 'refined' my script so that rather than it create a folder on your desktop it simply opens Nautilus to display the contents of the attachment.

This is the new version of the script:

#!/bin/bash

LOCATION=/tmp/winmail_$$.dat

mkdir $LOCATION
/usr/bin/tnef -C $LOCATION --save-body -f $1

nautilus $LOCATION

The interesting part of this script for me is the $$ - this special script variable is the process ID (PID) of the currently running script, so it makes a temporary file called winmail_<current process id>.dat. Other than that it's pretty similar to my original script apart from opening Nautilus at the end.

Now it's even easier to open and extract files from winmail.dat files!

I found out the reason for the $$ from here.

Technorati Tags: winmail.dat, TNEF, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Andrew Beacock

Viewing Outlook vCalendar meeting invites in Thunderbird

I received an Outlook meeting invite in my email recently but because I use Thunderbird as my email reader I received the raw vCalendar data rather than a nicely formatted email with details of the meeting. After a quick google search I found a post on Daniel Tome's blog regarding Viewing Calendar Events in Mozilla Thunderbird.

His suggestion was to install a Thunderbird add-on called Lightning. This adds a calendar into Thunderbird and also adds support for understanding vCalendar events. More information can be found at Lightning's home page.



I installed the add-on and restarted Thunderbird and now the raw vCalendar email was transformed into a nicely formatted meeting invite - you even get the option to accept or decline the meeting. Just remember to right-click on the green "Install Now" button to download the add-on otherwise you will install it into firefox.

Thanks again Daniel!.

Technorati Tags: Thunderbird, Outlook, vCalendar, meeting, event, Lightning, Daniel Tome, Andrew Beacock

Opening winmail.dat (TNEF) files in Thunderbird (on Ubuntu)

 
UPDATE: I have an improved version of the script available here.

I'm not going to repeat the many, many websites taking (and complaining) about Microsoft's proprietary e-mail attachment format called TNEF.

I'm assuming that if you are reading this then you have found that these fixes are not working for you (or not possible to enforce). I'll also assume that the LookOut Thunderbird Add-on by Aron Rubin is also not working correctly for you (this was my experience on Ubuntu Edgy Eft).

The best solution I could come up with was getting Thunderbird to run a script to unpack the winmail.dat extension into a folder on your Ubuntu desktop.

It relies on the tnef command-line program, so make sure that is installed first (it's bundled with Ubuntu):

sudo aptitude install tnef

Below is my little script, save it in a file called 'tnef.sh' somewhere and make sure it's executable (chmod +x tnef.sh) - or just download it here.

#!/bin/bash

LOCATION=~/Desktop/winmail.dat

mkdir $LOCATION
/usr/bin/tnef -C $LOCATION --save-body -f $1

Now find an email in Thunderbird with a winmail.dat attachment. Double click it and select to open it with the newly saved tnef.sh file:



Look on your desktop - there should be a 'winmail.dat' directory with the full contents of the attachment.

Double-clicking on any future winmail.dat file will result in the contents of the attachment to also be added to that directory.

Technorati Tags: winmail.dat, TNEF, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Andrew Beacock

Never forget to attach a file to an email with the AttachmentRemember Thunderbird extension

AttachmentRemember is a rather nifty Thunderbird extension checks your outgoing email message for words that indicate that you might have wanted to attach a file to your email before you sent it.

So the message "Please see the attached file" would trigger if there was no attachment (once you add the keyword "attach" to the extension).

Talk about saving face in the work place.

Technorati Tags: Email, Attachment, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Andrew Beacock

Mozilla's Thunderbird email client turns 1.5!

It's not the newest news in the world (it's been out a few days) but I wanted to share that Thunderbird, the free and rather excellent email client has been upgraded significant from 1.0.7 to 1.5. I've been using Thunderbird for quite a while now both on Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux and find it to be extremely stable and a pleasure to use.

Technorati Tags: Mozilla, Thunderbird, Andrew Beacock