Exchange 2007 journal reports and winmail.dat attachments

  • Article

I worked an issue today that I thought I would mention since there seems to be others out there with it.

Issue:

Journal Reports that were forwarded to an external smtp address were received with winmail.dat attachment.

 

Cause for this issue:

Exchange 2007 Journal Message Behavior for encoding:

    - Messages sent to an internal journal recipient are TNEF encoded.

    - Messages which are sent to an external SMTP address are still encoded like Exchange Server 2003 did them.

Exchange 2003 Journal Message Behavior for encoding:

   - Only the attachments for the journal messages are TNEF encoded.

      The content type is defined as multipart/mixed.

      The message body is Content-Type: text/plain;

      The attachment is encoded as Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="winmail.dat".

*By having Outlook forward the journal report to the external recipient, the message was then treated as any other external message instead of as a journal report.

Resolution:

1. Create a distribution list to journal to.

2. Add the journal mailbox as a member to that group.

3. Add a mail enabled contact (for the external recipient) as a member of the group.

4. Go to the properties of the database that you want to journal & add the distribution group as the journal recipient.

 

There have been quite a few changes in message journaling in Exchange 2007, you will want to read up on it. Here is a link to the whitepaper. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738122.aspx