Email text format

Hi cls23.

Being able to email your paystubs to employees is a great way to save time when providing them their payroll information. I'd be happy to help you with this.

The way QuickBooks Desktop sends out your pay stub emails is by sending the information to your email provider that then sends it out to the email address you send it to. Sending the file as a Windat is an error with Microsoft Office that affects every other email provider. If changing the format doesn't fix it I recommend reaching out to Microsoft support to see if they have any other fixes. Another option is using a different email to send out your paystubs to your employees.

If you have any questions let us know and we'd be happy to help.

Hi Steve D2.

Being able to email your employees their paystubs is a great way to provide their payroll information as soon as you run payroll. I'd be happy to go over why the windat file is sent.

As stated earlier Windat is caused by an error with Microsoft Outlook. This is due to Outlook not being able to understand the file format and instead sends it instead as a Windat. I recommend following the steps in this article on how to troubleshoot this issue. If these steps don't resolve the issue I suggest trying a different email or contacting Microsoft to get this resolved.

If you have any questions let us know and we'd be happy to help.

I've tried this solution already but it didn't work; paystubs are still being converted to windat files.  I believe it's because the payroll module doesn't open an actual outlook new message window which IS what happens when you email a customer invoice -- the paystubs just send on their own in the background rather than you having to physically press the SEND button on each message.

Since this solution doesn't work anyway, I've put my Outlook default back to HTML because it's actually quite inconvenient to have new Outlook messages default to Plain Text instead of HTML as my auto signature doesn't work unless I switch the message back to HTML.

If Quickbooks would change how the paystubs are sent from the software to mirror how customer invoices are sent from the software, this issue would be solved.

Hello @cls23 ,

Go to your Outlook Options.  Select Mail.  Scroll down until you reach the Message format section.  On the line that says "When sending messages in Rich Text format to Internet recipients:", choose Convert to HTML format.

The emails coming from Quickbooks Desktop are formatted in RTF.  If you do not choose the setting above in Outlook, the non-Outlook using recipients will likely receive a winmail.dat file rather than a PDF.

Check out this great info from Diane Poremsky, an ace Microsoft MVP.  She explains it very well.

https://www.slipstick.com/problems/outlook-is-sending-winmail-dat-attachments/.

I think that should solve your problem.  Good luck!