Why do some incidents have a winmail.dat or an Rfc822 or rtf file attachment associated with it? 

Environment:

Incidents, Incoming Email
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

Incidents are created with a winmail.dat or an Rfc822/rtf file attachment under the following conditions.  The incident itself will either be blank or have extraneous code in the body.

• The incident is created from an email sent to a Oracle-managed mailbox.
   
• The sender uses Microsoft Outlook as their email client and an Outlook client or Exchange server is configured to send Rich Text Formatted (RTF) only messages.

Under these conditions, when the email is sent, the winmail.dat or Rfc822/rtf file is sent along with the email. The files contains special formatting information that is only recognized by other Outlook email clients. 

Please note that, Rich Text is a Microsoft proprietary format that is largely unsupported by other email clients, including Oracle B2C Service.

Here is a wiki link that discusses Microsoft's propriety format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulation_Format

This issue is addressed in more detail in Microsoft knowledge article 278061 for Outlook 2002 and 2003. Please refer to Winmail.dat sent as an email attachment in Outlook 2007 and 2010 for newer versions.

To help improve your experience with these file attachment types, just like opening a .docx file, which requires that you have Word installed, it is dependent on the machine to be able to support the ability to decode and view the contents of the file attachment.  To resolve this, you need to have the appropriate software (ie, a winmail.dat reader or other internal or third party tool) that would allow you to open these files.