Customers are receiving E-Mails as 'Winmail.dat' files

customers-are-receiving-e-mails-as-winmail-dat-files

Customers are receiving E-Mails as 'Winmail.dat' files

24th January 2020

when sending e-mails with attachments through IRIS Accountancy suite, customers are receiving them as an attachment 'Winmail.dat'.

The Reason for this is due to the nature of how IRIS sends emails as plain text, and recipients who are using apple device’s will not be able to view these. The email attachment will be accessible on Window devices.

Due to this there are the following options: Advise the client to download a winmail.dat viewer for their apple device, we have tested the device shown below and confirmed this allows the attachment to be accessed by running through the following steps: The user will go to the email where it will show as winmail.dat, they can tap on the attachment and one of the options will be the image below, this then shows the email and the document which can be accessed.

The second option would be to send emails for clients who receive winmail.dat attachments separately, e.g. Print and post or save outside of IRIS to email through outlook.  This could be done by completing the first batch of emails using clients who have the Email | Yes category on the selection tab when generating statements. Once these are generated and emails you could run a second batch of statements for those clients who have reported the winmail.dat issue, these clients could be filtered by creating a new category and running off the statements for client assigned against this category.  The link HERE will assist with creating a new category.

We do have an open enhancement ticket logged with the product development team in regards to enabling the email facility in IRIS to send in a HMTL format rather than plain text.  Currently this ticket does not include a fix version (when the enhancement will be incorporated in the product) but we will update this KB article with any further information.