Hello, my friend has extra winks installed on his WLM 2012 but he does not want to lose.
I have searched for programs and found a program MSN Backup but does not work with wlm 2012 files.
How can i extract wink files and import them? thanks to all
Hey Jose. I’ve been working on this based a small project I started for adding winks no longer available with 2012 but never fully finished. Unfortunately I’ve had some difficulty getting 7.0 to work using the same method I was using before.
I have old backups I created 10 years ago from the MSN Backup application you mention, and just testing quickly, I couldn’t even get those to work on 7. So the whole thing is definitely still a work in progress.
Unfortunately with winks, you can’t manually add them as you can with custom emoticons or display pictures, as they need to be added in a certain way (and there’s no button for ‘Add new wink’ in Messenger).
My ultimate goal is to get all the objectstore assets (winks, custom emoticons, display pictures) transferable between versions.
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I appreciate your job.
I have searched the internet and exists an official tool to add and support winks for WLM (2009 too) 
This is Windows Live Messenger Backup from msn italy but now no working the download 
link is broken http://www.messenger.it/backup.aspx
More information in this post (spanish):
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You can get the tool still from the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120107013142/http://www.messenger.it/MessengerBackup.exe
However, if I recall, all this tool does is archive/copy files, which won’t work here as the wink/emoticon/et al format is different for MSN Messenger.
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still useful if you want to downgrade to an escargot version like 7.5, but want to keep all your stuff so when Escargot Supports WLM, you can restore your old stuff, so you can use your stuff like you still had that version.
I may be wrong but I’m not sure it’s possible to move files from < 7.x to > 8.x
From what I discovered, the files are encrypted differently starting from 8.x
Maybe those tools are decrypting the files and reencrypting them in the new format… we will have to try.
7.x: C:\Users(username)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MSN Messenger,
Search for "Winks3"
Open the folder
Open .dat files in 7-Zip
Contents Look Like This:
(content.xml, (name).png, (name).swf.)
(bonus): if you want the winks animation files, extract from said .dat files.
WLM 2011 (extract from installer)
Open wlsetup-all.exe in 7zip
in 7zip goto: "wlsetup-all.exe.rsrc\0\PACKAGE\P56200037\MessengerLang.7z\MessengerLang.cab\MessengerLang.msi"
open "winksmct"
inside you will find:
alot of .mct files
Each MCT contains a Wink.
im sorry, or did you not read this line?
also are all winks just a .cab file
mcts & MSNM7 .dat files use MSZip.
Hi, thanks for you information, i can extract .mct winks? and why? i am search MSZIP and I don’t understand…
you can extract the .mct winks, however it is impossible to recompile the content packs.
i would like to extract a wink of messenger 2009 mct to import to messnger 8.5 (the last support escargout) replacing the content swf of dat file
it’s possible? and in that case you can help me? many thanks
you don’t need a extractor, you need a content installer, the way that .mco files work have not changed forever, if your .mct has multiple .mct’s inside, it should NOT be separated into multiple files, keep them as they are, they won’t work when split into files, they must be together as one .mct file, also, .mct are .cab’s as mentioned before in this thread. so mct should work fine if renamed into .mco (Messenger COntent files).
Many thanks yellows111, i opened cmt file and extract swf, gif, content
but i need insert to .dt2 file and .id2 file (with winrar open dt2, but id2 its imposible)
how i can open dt2 file? Do you know how, thanks again
i forgot, but the (.dt2 and id2) files, one of them is Metadata, and the other is a image (if your talking about emoticons)