Evolution TNEF Support HOWTO

This is a very quick post that details how to install TNEF support in Evolution, using the ytnef library and the simple TNEF support plugin developed by Michael Zucchi. I understand that Michael no longer works on this and so I will set up a project to improve the plug-in. For now, though, you can get basic functionality that interprets the contents of the winmail.dat attachments and shows them as additional attachments.

Requirements

Before you begin, you'll need to download a few things: ytnef and libytnef Michael's plugin

You'll also need the following evolution components, provided by your OS package management tool:

 o evolution
 o evolution-devel
 o evolution-data-server
 o evolution-data-server-devel
 o g++ compiler

On most systems, do:

yum install evolution-devel evolution-data-server-devel

Installation

1. Install all of the evolution packages above

2. Install ytnef and libytnef

3. Download and unpack the tnef plugin

4. Make a symlink from the version of the evolution plug-in package you've got to the one that the TNEF package needs:

 ln -s /usr/lib/pkgconfig/evolution-plugin-2.6.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/evolution-plugin-2.4.pc

or on more recent releases

 ln -s /usr/lib/pkgconfig/evolution-plugin.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/evolution-plugin-2.4.pc

5. Replace all evolution-plugin-2.4 text with your version

 sed "s/evolution-plugin-2.4/evolution-plugin-2.8/" -i.org configure

6. Configure, make and make install the TNEF plugin

7. Restart Evolution

Conclusion

This is my first Wiki post anywhere and I wasn't making notes as I went along so I've probably missed something out. But if you follow these instructions, then you should find that attachments sent to you by Outlook should appear as extra attachments in Evolution. No support is provided for rich text messages - the only change is in attached files. But it's something!

References

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-256027.html

The ubuntuforums thread above above was obsolete for me (Ubuntu 9.04 with evolution 2.26.1), I ended up successfully activating Tnef with "sudo aptitude install evolution-plugins-experimental" - then restarting evolution. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=855440