Attachments turn into *.dat

[james.chim]

A user raised a ticket to JIRA Service Desk with an email attachment, which is an excel file.

When it is viewed in the portal, the attachment turns into a dat file, which is not readable.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi,

I see that you have found Service Desk is storing these attachments into a .dat file.  Perhaps these have a filename such as winmail.dat

My colleague @Angélica Luz created a helpful article about this problem in https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-articles/Winmail-dat-and-Jira-Service-Desk/ba-p/948080

Essentially, this happens because the sender is using a Microsoft mail client, like outlook.  There are specific settings within that sender's email client that would have to be adjusted to prevent this.  Jira does not have a means to change this, it is only storing the attached file in the manner it sees it.  You could follow the steps in a guide such as https://www.lifewire.com/prevent-sending-winmail-dat-attachments-1173717 to have that client stop sending those kinds of .dat attachments.

I hope this helps.

Andy