439      人物

Removing Attachments from Mail in Sierra

Since upgrading to OSX Sierra I and finding that I can no longer 'remove attachments' using the 'Message / Remove attachments' command. Although the attachment is plainly there in the email the option in menu is greyed-out so I can't delete the attachment to save space. Anyone else having this problem or know of a fix?

Hi,

I don't know the solution, but a workaround would be to use the new optimize storage utility: Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

Thanks but not really the solution I'm looking for. I try and keep all attachments saved with job they relate to then delete them from mail to keep it from overloading. I've experienced this in the past with various mail programs - after a few years they all get full up and start behaving oddly!

I had this problem a few OS versions ago. Never found a solution, only workarounds. Sad to see it's back.

For me, the "Remove attachments" option is not greyed out, it's selectable but nothing happens.

I'm starting to build up quite a number of email messages with attachments to them, normally I save them and then remove them to keep the Mail database slim.

Correction: I'm perfectly able to remove small attachments, but if they're larger than … say … 5 MB, the command won't bite.

Considering how long it took for Apple to fix this last time, I guess I'm stuck with my attachments 'til 2020 or so.

This is quite annoying, there seem to be some major limitations to the way this command works currently. You can select messages individually and the attachments will remove quite easily, but select a group and it either fails or goes very, very slow. In order to reduce the chances of a failure, I do a few things:

Create a smart mailbox and change to Classic View so I can sort by message size. Smart Mailbox is created with:

Message is in mailbox - (chosen mailbox)

Contains attachments

I found that Mail.app was pulling in messages with previously removed attachments. It was not updating the size of these message to the new size (I sort by size and start with the biggest messages) even though all that remained was a txt file with a note about the attachment removal, these messages were still 5 or 6mb or whatever they originally were. These messages will grey out the 'Remove Attachments' menu option, so will cause the process to fail and need to be filtered out.

Entire message - does not contain - "has been manually removed"

Entire message - does not contain - Mail Attachment.txt

Then I turn off 'Organize by Conversation'.

Now select all the messages you want to remove attachments from and go and do something else for quite a while. Its very, very slow, but with the above filtered out, does seem to be mostly successful.

Note, there is no progress shown in the Activity window. Apple, at least you could add some feedback there to show whats actually happening in the background.

One more issue, if an email has an attachment which is another email, you need to filter these out too, as for whatever reason these will grey out the option and cause a batch process to fail, so add this to the Smart Mailbox rules:

Entire message - does not contain - .eml

It should work normally (takes a few seconds sometimes) in Sierra. Maybe you can do following:

-- Really Quit Mail, from the menu, then restart it, and try Mail.

-- Still the same? restart the mac in the safe mode, when logged in, do nothing, but restart the mac normally.

Please see my messages above. As explained, some emails will cause the process to fail. This appears to the be the main issue.

I hope I did not make a mistake: I made a recommendation to the OP.

A few OSX generations ago a rewrite of Apple Mail changed it from being extremely reliable to shaky in many respects. The 'remove mail attachment' action is one of the failures. I've been online with several Apple reps (sharing my screen) and they also repeated the failure (on their computers) but had no solution. I made a bug report and hoped that Sierra would deliver a fix. No such luck. On my iMacs, the effect is that removing attachments deletes the whole email. If I search for it in trash, the attachment is still there.

I suggest that every user with a Mail problem file a bug report. That's the only way to get some attention.

Editing  with TexEdit the .emlx file in the directory /Users/Username/Library/Mail/V4/Mailboxes

seems to be the only way to remove attachments from any email so far.

Just be aware that in doing this you need to know what you are doing

it's not for beginners or you could end up ruining everything: do a backup and experiment it first on one email you don't care, like have someone send you an email with a small attachment.

Open the email, delete just the attachment  below your message, save it, close Mail, re-launch Mail, and the attachment has gone.

I discovered that finding the .emlx file it's easier than it seems:

1) Quit Mail and open the folder V4    in /Users/Username/Library/Mail/V4/

2) write  in the search field the Subject of the email you are looking for:

magically the email appears with the name of the sender or the senders if you have more than one email

with the same words. Choose the one you were looking for

3) drag the email on TexEdit

4) find the attachment : it will look like garbled text- something like

/9j/4UcWRXhpZgAATU0AKgAAAAgACwEPAAIAAAAGAAAAkgEQAAIAAAAPAAAA

mAESAAMAAAABAAEAmAESAAMAAAABAAEAmAESAAMAAAABAAEA

It will be very long, depending how big is the attachment

5) Select it all but stop before  you get to something similar to

--Apple-Mail-CA458EBA-4B87-4995-8B30-3FC1A217

Content-Type: text/plain;

  charset=us-ascii

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

5) delete your selection and restart Mail

Your email is clean of any attachment.

I'm 100% with you. The way you summarized this shameful issue was the best description I've found so far.

Maybe we have to consider a donation to Apple to start thinking seriously about Mail X or Mail macOS...

最后更新：2017-09-04 06:44:10

  上一篇： icdd PrintUITool Chewing up CPU Cycles

  下一篇： I use Apple Mail v10.3 on a iMac using OS 10.12...