Description
Emails to incidents come in as winmail.dat attachments
Symptoms
Email from Outlook produces an empty Incident record containing an attachment named winmail.dat.
This issue was first observed in Berlin.
Cause
Microsoft Outlook sometimes sends emails in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF). ServiceNow does not understand TNEF. This only happens when a contact for your ServiceNow instance's email address exists in Exchange, and has been configured to use MAPI rich text format.
Note: Additional information on this issue is available from Microsoft Support.
Resolution
To prevent this, you need to configure the Exchange server to not send Rich Text formatted (RTF) data to ServiceNow instances.
- Log in to your Exchange Server 2010 by opening the Exchange Management Console (EMC).
- Expand Microsoft Exchange On-Premise…
- Expand Recipient Configuration.
- Select Mail Contact.
- Find the contact that represents your ServiceNow instance email (e.g., the one that sends emails to <instancename>@service-now.com).
- In our example, we will assume the contact is named Marketing Requests (yours will be named differently).
- Open Marketing Requests Properties.
- Select the General tab.
- In the Use MAPI rich text format field, select Never (as shown below).
- Click OK.
Verification
To verify that this workaround prevents Microsoft Outlook from sending emails in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format, change the Use MAPI rich text format field to either Always or Use default setting and click OK.