Odoo: How to process winmail.dat attached in conversations?

Question

We have some customers who uses Microsoft Outlook to send attachments. However in odoo we see only winmail.dat files (while everything looks ok in mail client).

Is there any way to force odoo to expose winmail.dat content?

Answer 1

The problem is that Microsoft Outlook uses Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format and packs all attachments in one file.

There is a good python parser for tnef format - tnefparse. I'd suggest you to use it and write simple module to extend mail.thread model like this

from tnefparse import TNEF
from openerp.osv import osv

class MailThread(osv.Model):
    _inherit = 'mail.thread'

    def _message_extract_payload(self, message, save_original=False):
        body, attachments = \
            super(MailThread, self)\
                ._message_extract_payload(message, save_original=save_original)

        new_attachments = []
        for name, content in attachments:
            new_attachments.append((name, content))
            if name and name.strip().lower() in ['winmail.dat', 'win.dat']:
                try:
                    winmail = TNEF(content)
                    for attach in winmail.attachments:
                        new_attachments.append((attach.name, attach.data))
                except:
                    # some processing here
                    pass

        return body, new_attachments

You can find more information on how to do custom modules here.