SaveAllAttachments Archives And Deletes Outlook File Attachments

This is an excellent way to trim the size of your email files. On Thunderbird I used Attachement Extractor to do this. Very helpful.

RelativeRon

@keycool: talk to my employer who makes me use an exchange account with 250Mb upper limit

Nirmal Patel

is there anything that
1) saves the attachment to disk
2) deletes the attachment from the message
3) but puts a link in the message to the file on the disk??

Nirmal Patel

I'm trying not to specifically be a Gmail fanboy, but...

Conceptually, in the year 2009, shouldn't we be able to keep our attachments and emails together without experiencing poor to unusable performance from email clients?

keycool

@Nirmal Patel: I've been using MAPILab's Attachments Processor for several years now.

[www.mapilab.com]

Not free, but it's worked very well. It not only does everything you listed, but will do it automatically, (rules-based), and will replace the link with the actual file if you need to forward the email.

FYI, I don't have anything to do with the company, I just like their product.

junkmail

I use Outlook Attachment Remover:

[www.kopf.com.br]

It's free, it can replace attachments with links to the file on your hard drive, you can filter the attachments it removes. I love it.

Sean Groom

@Nirmal Patel:

Ditto keycool. Corporate Outlook mailbox limits kill the ability to keep files and emails together. Storage is so cheap that I always argue this point with my IT guy.

tcatnat

Can't speak for everyone, but it's rarely the poor IT Guy's fault. Most of the time, the decision is made by some non-IT corporate honcho. We're just the fall guys who get stuck carrying out their decisions.

Brodie Krause

@Nirmal Patel:

You could easily make a VB script. I probably have one laying around that does all that but put a link in the file...that might take some messaging of exchange....

Ryan Beall

@Nirmal Patel:

Yep, this:
[www.kopf.com.br]

Its free, I love it.

downstairs

@Brodie Krause: In any case, things are changing as more and more regulations come into play.

@keycool: take if from a business's perspective. They can keep the files but it cost money for more server space. Not to mention just leaving mail with confidential documents attatched is a security risk. Many companies don't even allow you to attach documents. So there are many businesses that just don't want masses of docs, spreadsheets, etc just sitting there on an outlook servers.

diamonddnice

Now if we can only keep Outlook from freezing up every time I click on an email with an attachment.

Any plug ins for that one?

James Molinaro

@Sean Groom: I use that as well, reinstall it every time I reimage. Great utility.

Chris

@tcatnat: For most people that is fine. But there are always a few people who never delete anything. I manage an Exchange server at work, and some people will keep over 10GB worth of e-mail in their Inbox and then complain that Outlook is slow. We try to be generous with the amount of storage we give employees, but at some point it's no longer the IT guys' fault. I see this tool coming in handy for some of my more problematic cases.

@Sean Groom: Thanks for the tip, Sean (and downstairs!) -- this looks fantastic!

pale_blue_eyes

@diamonddnice: Despite difficulties with current solutions used for serving messages and storing information client side, I think that it should not be difficult to produce secure solutions that can keep our files with invaluable narrative and/or conversational context rather than separating the two. Seems like a no brainier to me.

keycool

It should be noted that Outlook already allows you to save multiple attachments for any given message (File > Save Attachments). This program (according to the article) adds the ability to save attachments from multiple messages and to then delete the attachments from the message.

bigvince1981

@Sean Groom: I'd like to second the shout out to Outlook Attachment Remover. It allows you to replace the attachments with links to the files on your HD. It's also compatible with both Outlook 2003 and 2007.

BriceFonzie

If only I had known about this (Outlook Attachment Remover) when I was a daily Outlook user... I used to deal with this by hand, saving/removing the attachment and then editing the message with a line of text to remind myself that I'd removed said attachment. This looks like a great tool to automate that process.

Davehacker

Is there an app to make your boss actually *click the button* to save the attachments in the first place?? Few things are more fun than slogging thru 8GB+ of e-mail. @tcatnat and @Nirmal Patel, I applaud your employers--streamlined e-mail is a beautiful thing.

wematanye

Outlook Attachment Remover Add-in, which you can download at [www.kopf.com.br] saves the attachments and replace them with links to actual files. It is free and I love it.

@[www.rsbr.de]

It does exactly what you need, plus it automatically replaces the links the the actual attachment if you reply/forward.

Doug Dimick

@Nirmal Patel: Jeez, am I the only one that was stupid enough to pay money for a solution to this problem??

Thanks Doug and downstairs, I'll look into both of those. :)

junkmail

DOH!! I've been using EZDetach for a couple years, and it works well, but costs $40. Curses.

costero

And for getting files off of the email server. My last company would benefit from this, since people send attachments left and right, and most people like to save them.

@keycool: security is a much bigger concern for many companies then storing the email.

diamonddnice

This is the thing I would want but our institute still uses Outlook 2003.

This doesn't seem to work for me, it will only seeem to work on a single email at a time - and then it deletes the attachment....and place a link to the name of the file but then windows goes into a search mode to find it, never finding the file.

Anyone else have problems?

mattarse

This doesn't seem to work for me, it will only seeem to work on a single email at a time - and then it deletes the attachment....and place a link to the name of the file but then windows goes into a search mode to find it, never finding the file.

Anyone else have problems?

mattarse

You have no idea how much I will appreciate this!

One of the monthly chores I have at work is to scan various customer-related material as pdf's. This I do on the big print/scan monster in the room next door. The scanned files are then emailed to me, after which I rename the 20-30 odd pdf's automatically and save them in whichever folder they belong.

Having this add-on means that I can extract all the scanned pdf's in one go, saving a lot of tedious work.

Respect! :-)

@Ryan Beall: Here's my VBScript that copies the attachment to disk and replaces it with a link. I've used it with both Outlook 2003 and 2007 for a couple of years now. Enjoy!

Sub SaveAttachment()
'Replaces e-mail attachment(s) with link(s) to the attachment(s) saved on disk
'v1.0.1 18Mar2008 strMsgName now derived from MAPI namespace (avoids security message)
'v1.0.0 12Jul2007

Dim myolApp As Outlook.Application
Dim myInspector As Outlook.Inspector
Dim myItem As Outlook.MailItem
Dim myAttachments As Outlook.Attachments
Set myolApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set myInspector = myolApp.ActiveInspector
Set myFileSystem = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
'specify where the attachments will be saved
strAttachmentPath = "C:\attachments\"

If Not TypeName(myInspector) = "Nothing" Then
If TypeName(myInspector.CurrentItem) = "MailItem" Then
Set myItem = myInspector.CurrentItem
Set myAttachments = myItem.Attachments
If myAttachments.Count > 0 Then

'get the message details
'code credit: [www.outlookcode.com]
'avoids security message: "A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook"
Dim strID As String
Dim olNS As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim olMail As Outlook.MailItem
Dim strFileName As String
strID = myItem.EntryID
Set olNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set olMail = olNS.GetItemFromID(strID)
strMsgName = olMail.Subject & ", " & olMail.SenderName & ", " _
& Format(olMail.SentOn, "ddmmmyyyy hh.mm.ss AMPM")
Set olMail = Nothing
Set olNS = Nothing

'(remove any invalid characters in folder name)
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "/", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "\", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, ":", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "*", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "?", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, """", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "<", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, ">", ".")
strMsgName = Replace(strMsgName, "|", ".")

'confirm action with user
Dim strPrompt As String
strPrompt = "Are you sure you want remove the attachment(s) from this message?" _
& Chr$(13) & Chr$(13) & "(Attachments will be saved to """ & strAttachmentPath & strMsgName & """)"
If MsgBox(strPrompt, vbYesNo + vbQuestion) = vbYes Then
'create paths
If Not myFileSystem.FolderExists(strAttachmentPath) Then
myFileSystem.CreateFolder (strAttachmentPath)
End If
If Not myFileSystem.FolderExists(strAttachmentPath & strMsgName) Then
myFileSystem.CreateFolder (strAttachmentPath & strMsgName)
End If
'save each attachment and add link to its new location
intCount = myAttachments.Count
For i = 1 To intCount
myAttachments.Item(i).SaveAsFile strAttachmentPath & strMsgName & "\" & _
myAttachments.Item(i).DisplayName
myItem.Attachments.Add strAttachmentPath & strMsgName & "\" & _
myAttachments.Item(i).DisplayName, _
OlAttachmentType.olByReference
Next i
'delete the original attachments
For i = 1 To intCount
myAttachments.Item(1).Delete
Next i
myItem.Save
End If
Set myItem = Nothing
Set myAttachments = Nothing
End If
Else
'not a mail message, so do nothing
End If
End If

'clean up before exit
Set myolApp = Nothing
Set myInspector = Nothing
Set myFileSystem = Nothing

End Sub

bobbo33

@bobbo33: I am going to try this out tomorrow...

Nirmal Patel

@Doug Dimick: This one's shareware... 30 days before registration..

Nirmal Patel

@downstairs: Lovely... only one thing missing from this one is the ability to have it run automatically on all incoming/outgoing emails..

Nirmal Patel

I certainly feel the pain of these with corporate caps, but to answer the original question, yes, one can! I've got over 10 years worth of email in a couple of Outlook archive files and I have fine performance looking through everything. I'm not saying that Outlook is perfect. It could be improved in so many ways. But I also like it, over gmail even, because it's so flexible and integrates everything in one app. (I know, I know, this is precisely the reason so many hate it.) To each his own I suppose.

jayp01

@Sean Groom: i've been using it for a while too... no problems. great add in