Re: [Evolution] Open .dat files

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Tue, 2010-08-10 at 12:12 +0200, Chris Blake wrote:
> Greetings community,
>
> I need to open .dat files in Evolution.
>
> I searched the archives for a solution to this and only found this :
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2002-November/thread.html
>
> Reading all the mails that came up about this topic leaves me to believe
> that Evolution can not yet open .dat files inline.
>
> I installed ytnef/tneg packages but this will only open the files if I
> first save them to my drive and then run ytnef -f <filename>.dat, which
> is not ideal.

Not all .dat files are TNEF files - using a three letter extension to
indicate the contents of a file is a microsoftism and extensions do not
have any particular meaning to the operating system in Unix.  Further,
even under DOS, .dat is just a generic extension for files that contain
"data".  So making it so that *all* .dat files are displayed in-line as
TNEF files is just wrong.

As far as I know the TNEF files from MS packages are called
"winmail.dat" and should have the appropriate mime type set - I
*thought* that Evo was able to handle them, but I can't remember the
last time I got one!

P.