Email attachments being changed to .DAT ?

[The_KiD]

Anyone know why when sending something like a Word document to a person it would change the attachment from a .DOC to a .DAT file?

There is nothing unusual about the DOC no passwords or encryption and it seems to only do it when it goes external.

You can then re-name the the .DOC back to .DAT and it will work, but why is this happening?

 

[The_KiD]

nm I found it:

If you have Outlook set to send messages using RTF format, then any attachments you send will be combined into a file called WINMAIL.DAT which is attached to the email. RTF is, in theory, a "standard" format, but each application which uses it seems to use a different version of this standard. In fact, the only software which understands these WINMAIL.DAT files is Microsoft Outlook.

http://www.quarella.co.uk/email/attachments.html