Well, much as I hate to admit it, I was wrong. It apparently was Outlook, and although I can't explain why this happened, this is what happened:
I send regularly to two Yahoo groups associated with my kids' school, of which I'm a member of the board of directors. One is for board discussions and one is for communication to the families of the school. I send to the groups often at the same time and I've send emails to them both for years. Somehow, in the past few weeks, something happened to the little-known (to me) "nickname" file in which Outlook stores its email addresses to which you've sent emails previously. It's a handy thing that auto-fills the To: or Cc: fields when you type the first couple of letters of an email address. It's different from the address book in that it stores ALL email addressess to which you send email, not just those that you choose to put in your address book. Turns out that something had happened in that file which caused Outlook to send differently to one group (which received attachments correctly) vs. the other group (which received, apparently, winmail.dat attachments). I have no explanation for this, but when I deleted the file in which Outlook keeps these email addresses (suffix: .nk2), the problem went away. FYI, for anyone who posts to Yahoo groups with attachments, using Outlook. I've used Outlook for 10 years and never had this problem before. It took a bit of digging to find it. The typical suggestion is to "send in Plain Text format when sending to non-Outlook users", but that solution has no effect when this problem with the nickname file is in play. And now for relevance: back to the original purpose of this email string: dupes! I haven't received any dupes from any of my Yahoo groups for about the past 6 hours. Progress?? Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Tserkezis Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 11:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Treo] Dup emails Don Ferguson wrote: > I'd say it's 95+% odds that it's a problem in Yahoo groups and 5-% chance > that it's something in Exchange. Yahoo doesn't work like that. Wherever it's coming from, the winmail.dat attachement is NOT coming from yahoo. Therefor, there's a 100% chance it's in your 5% chance group. > Don't be too quick to judge the Outlook/Exchange pair, especially in the > Palm Treo world. It's here to stay, it works VERY well, and it's why I > can get my email, calendar and contacts on my 700p, usually before > Outlook gets them, at no additional cost and with no central Canadian > server farm getting in my way (take THAT! Blackberry users!!). I know > there's a lot of anti-Microsoft sentiment out there, but most of it's > misplaced. Their products provide significant function and in my > experience are very reliable -- far more reliable than Yahoo groups has > been as of late. I didn't say exchange didn't work, (though I may have danced around the fact I outright hate it myself), I more implied it was a human error thing. The best software in the world might not do the best job in the world if driven by a less than fully competent human. Likewise, this is a relatively common issue, and it's ALL outlook/exchange related. And on a previously related topic, a bit of digging revealed winmail.dat can be read by Outlook, Eudora, and there are manually operated utilities that can extract the contents of winmail.dat if you're stuck with the user not knowing enough about their system, and don't use outlook/exchange yourself. So, in a pinch, you can still take it apart yourself. -- Linux Registered User # 302622 <http://counter.li.org> Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
