[b0s0z0ku]

I work for a company with hosted BES/Exchange with a certain large provider. Since March of this year, all of our Blackberries have been sending out RTF Winmail.dat attachments containing the message text with any message sent from the Blackberry, regardless of whether it has an attachment, is a reply, or is a new message. Sending from Outlook and Entourage works fine.

When this started, nothing was changed on any of the Blackberries or on our account settings. We tried all sorts of settings on the Blackberries, full device wipe/reprovision, send service book, etc. Nothing has helped. The provider said that this problem was happening with a lot of users and would cease when BES was upgraded to SP3 in August. Unfortunately, the upgrade came and went and this problem is still happening.

The only advice that Support has is to wipe one of the handhelds again and try reprovisioning it (haven't had time yet). However, they say that other users have not had to do this. We're at wits' end with this, so any advice would be sincerely appreciated.

As far as devices that we're using, we've been using a mix, including the BB 8830. All of them have exhibited this problem, unfortunately.

Other than that, what are some decent providers for hosted BES -- our current provider hasn't been very helpful, has awful support and is slow on the Exchange side to boot!

Thanks,
-b.

[dev]

Have you tried changing the message format in the Outlook client to HTML instead of RTF to see what the outcome is when you do send from the device?

[hdawg]

Meh? Non Outlook email programs are receiving winmail.dat attachment when email is sent from a BlackBerry device

Is it only messages from HH that experience this problem? What version of Exchange & SP and BES & SP?

[b0s0z0ku]

Originally Posted by dev

Have you tried changing the message format in the Outlook client to HTML instead of RTF to see what the outcome is when you do send from the device?

Yes, that was suggested by the hosting provider. We did so, repeatedly, to no effect. Anyway, this should only affect messages send from that client, not from the BB.

Ideally, the provider would set their server to never send in RTF except inside the local domains (this was the fix suggested by MS), but they said they can't do that since domains other than ours are hosted on the server. As to why people would want to send RTF outside their company, I'm slightly confused, as you never know what client people are using to receive!

-b.

[b0s0z0ku]

Originally Posted by hdawg

Meh? Non Outlook email programs are receiving winmail.dat attachment when email is sent from a BlackBerry device

Is it only messages from HH that experience this problem? What version of Exchange & SP and BES & SP?

(Exchange 2003 + the latest BES SP3)

Well, I tried pointing out this fix to the hosting provider. Unfortunately, they'll have none of it, as it'll prevent TNEF/RTF messages from going outside the domains hosted on the local server. As to why someone would want to send a proprietary format outside their company to someone who's using an unknown client, I have no idea. Support also claims that Exchange 2003 doesn't have that setting. I tend to respectfully disagree:

How to configure Internet e-mail message formats at the user and the domain levels in Exchange Server 2003

Can anyone here name a hosted BES provider that's not completely awful?!? Or should be just go with ActiveSync or even Google Apps?

-b.

[mahoward]

We are a Domino shop and upgraded to 7.0.2 just so we could get native winmail.dat decoding on inbound SMTP mail. Are your recipients Domino users? Perhaps they could upgrade their SMTP gateway box to 7.0.2 to decode those little nasties.

Other than that maybe think about bringing the service in house in the future?

[hdawg]

I would think some of the sponsors on here aren't awful ... I might start a new thread asking for recommendations in there.

[b0s0z0ku]

Originally Posted by mahoward

We are a Domino shop and upgraded to 7.0.2 just so we could get native winmail.dat decoding on inbound SMTP mail. Are your recipients Domino users? Perhaps they could upgrade their SMTP gateway box to 7.0.2 to decode those little nasties.

Other than that maybe think about bringing the service in house in the future?

This happens with all non-Exchange recipients, unfortunately. Some wonder what it is. Others block it. Basically, there's no need to be sending TNEF outside the office, since you never know which client a recipient will be using.

In house for only a few people isn't really worth it.

-b.

[dev]

It's unfortunate that your provider is unwilling to at least try to help, maybe because you don't have that critical amount of users that would make them reconsider. I would suggest that you start shopping around for a better provider.