I thought I had a great idea to save email attachments to an external file for archiving but there appears to be an issue.
In Mail I thought I would highlight a bunch of old emails go to File/ Save Attachments… and then once they were in a folder I could free up Mail storage use by Message/Remove Attachments.
Unfortunately, I noticed that the Save Attachments command wasn’t capturing all of the emails. I ran several tests highlighting from 10 to 100 emails with attachments and it was very obviously not saving all of them. I tested on local folders in On My Mac emails with the same incomplete results.
My question to you all is, have your encountered this as a bug?
Or perhaps you use another method for archiving attachments off-site?
Thanks.
[running latest Ventura version of Mail]
I don’t use email as a filing system. If I receive email attachments that I need to save, I save them to my document filing system. It’s rare that I have more than than a week or two of email attachments to file.
My reasons for not using email for filing stems from my wife’s experiences. She retired as an email administrator and had many stories of people losing stuff when their email store got corrupted. While there may have been backups, there was always a delay while it was being restored.
I get that. And for the most part that’s how I go forward.
But, the main reason I was testing the Save Attachments command is that I’m helping out a friend who has a multi-year In-Box and and I want to clear out all the dead mail but there may be attachments in there that she didn’t save and I want to insure her that they are not lost.
Thanks for the reply.
I’d forgotten about the Download Attachments setting, but I checked just now and it was set to ALL. Also, as I mentioned in my post, I tested Save Attachments on a local On My Mac folder, since I know that the server could be a factor. Thanks for the tips.
