If you’ve ever received an email that is nothing more than an email with an attachment named winmail.dat, you’ve no doubt been frustrated. Thankfully, there are two utilities you can download for free that can help you read these files.

If you’re not familiar with winmail.dat files, they are simply emails sent from Windows users running Microsoft Outlook via an Exchange server who composed the email using RichText.

MailRaider

MailRaider can extract the text and images in that winmail.dat email attachment

MailRaider from 45 RPM Software, and TNEF’s Enough by Josh Jacob are both stand-alone utilities you can use to easily extract the RichText file and any images they may contain.

Both utilities worked perfectly for me running under Mac OS X Lion, as well as Snow Leopard.