So I have a ton of old Wink files i have saved from back when I was using MSN Messenger in high school. I recently found how to extract the data from them so I can relive, and regret, what I shared back before YouTube really took off.
For those that don't know Winks were images or gifs that could have sound. You sent them to friends like you would a any message. Unlike more current chat programs it was a one time send meaning the receiver didn't keep it in their history unless they downloaded it(from what I can remember). H264 encoding and decoding wasn't as wide spread as it is now hence the odd format. MS made Winks to be sort of like a Zip file.
Using 7Zip you can open up a Wink and look at what's inside and extract it. Normally it will look like:
Greeting
Icon
Image
Info
Sound
Note some Winks may not have sound. Files have no extensions
As these are small files, the biggest one I have is under 2MB, you can open in Notepad, Notepad++ is faster, and you can find the file type. I want to say Icon will always be PNG, but I can't confirm that.
Anyways I hope this helps someone out there. I had a hard time myself looking up any information on Winks and at the time they were really fun.