What Dat?

I get emails frequently with attachments from someone at a university research facility.
Their attchments are always winmail.dat attachments and I am not able to open or download them.
Usually, he has to wait to get home and resend to me it from another computer.
just a pia.
Is there something on my end that I can do to avoid this.
I looked into it but have not found a simple solution.
maybe a simple solution but this simpleton (me) does not know it.