A poster on macOSXHints has pointed out a super-quick way to save attachments in a Mail.app message.

As everyone knows, you can save attachments by dragging them from the message window to the Desktop or by using the “Save” button at the top of the message.

But there is a faster, smarter way, especially for messages with multiple attachments.

All you need to do is drag the actual paper clip icon to the Desktop:

This saves out all the attachments in one hit.

Another triumph for users in the face of Apple Mail’s many under-documented features.

[Thanks, Leonardo]Apple mail, mail.app, tips, attachments, saving, productivity

James Eagan has updated his Attachment Scanner plugin for Mail.app, which checks messages for attachments, and when it decides one is missing, give you a warning before you send.

With the help of several translators, it will now scan for attachments in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.

The plugin is freeware and you can get the updated version from James’ web site .mail.app, apple mail, plugins, attachments, localization

A post on macOSXHints reveals a tip that was news to me.

If you want to forward selected attachments in an email you have received, highlight them, click Forward (or Command-Shift-F) and a new message appears containing only the attachments you have selected.

Of course, this is just an extension of the standard behaviour with selected text. Blocking a selection of text in an mail and then starting a forwarded message (or a reply for that matter), opens a new message containing only that selected text.

Still, I had never thought of applying it to attachments. Nice one.mail.app, apple mail, text, forwarding, attachments, messages, tips

I had occasion at work today to be very grateful for TNEF’s Enough, a utility that decodes those annoying winmail.dat files which Exchange Server users send you when you are marked in their contacts as someone who accepts messages in RTF.

You know the kind of situation. The information that you need for a meeting arrives by email 15 minutes before the meeting starts. Bad enough.

To add to the drama, it is all crammed inside one of those winmail.dat files that Mail can’t process. The Registrar with whom you are meeting is a die-hard PC fan. He thinks that Mac computers are just glorified iPods. He’s gagging for me to come in and say I can’t get at the stuff on my MacBook Pro. It becomes a point of honour.

Thankfully, TNEF’s Enough handles these files very well. Save off the winmail.dat file, open it in Enough and there are your attachments, readable once more.

It’s like magic. You can get TNEF’s Enough from the developer’s web site . Who would be without it?winmail.dat, attachments, Microsoft, exchange server, mail.app, apple mail, tips, aarrrggghhhhh!

A poster on the macOSXHints forum wants to know how he can delete all the account information, emails and files that Mail.app uses, so that he can use Thunderbird in peace without wasting disk space.

He is told that he needs to delete the ~/Library/Mail folder. That’s the biggest disk hog, but it is not the only one.

In 10.4.x, Mail.app also sometimes stores attachments in a folder called (by default) ~/Library/Mail Downloads. You could kill that to save some space.

If you are in the mood, why not carry on and delete the Preferences file (com.apple.mail.plist) which stores all your account settings and so on. It’s in your ~/Library/Preferences folder.

For the final purge, you could delete Mail.app itself (46.8 MB) from the Applications folder. A desperately sad business.mail.app, apple mail, deleting, mail folder, attachments, preferences

Californian Security Researcher Tom Ferris has found another seven security flaws in Mac OSX.

They mostly involve the handling of images and decompression of zip files.

He expects that they will be addressed in the next Apple security update.

A St Louis Post-Dispatch article on the flaws urges caution , “Avoid opening strange or unusual e-mail attachments, and beware of Web links embedded in unsolicited Web correspondence.”

As many people pointed out during the excitement of the last round of security flaws, this has been pretty sensible advice since, like, forever.security, exploits, zip files, mac osx, images, attachments, mail.app, apple mail

A while ago, a Hawk Wings reader emailed me, asking for advice (often risky; not generally recommended).

He was having a problem with attachments:

When I use Apple Mail to upload an attachment, the recipients are unable to receive it. Particularly, their mail application will display an attachment icon, but there will be no attachment in their mailbox. This was never a problem with Entourage, and I don’t want to have to return to using that program. I’m just wondering if you have ever encountered this as an issue.

Annoying. Having read or heard somewhere that Outlook users in particular have this problem with attachment in Mail.app generated emails and that it is a function of the odd way in which Mail does HTML (“Rich Text”), I advised him to switch to plain text as the default Composing format (Preferences > Composing > Message Format).

That fixed the problem. Something to bear in mind if the same thing should happen to your recipients.attachments, mail.app, apple mail, outlook, problems, tips