OE freeware to strip attachments from emails yet leave message? [Freeware]

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From: Fairfax on 14 Oct 2009 07:58

From: Fairfax on 14 Oct 2009 08:06

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:58:15 -0500, Fairfax <SpamNot(a)NoJunkMail.org>
wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:59:19 -0700 (PDT), "Brian (Groups)"
><usspskghws(a)mailinator.com> wrote:
>
>>On Oct 14, 2:09�am, Fairfax <Spam...(a)NoJunkMail.org> wrote:
>>> Anyone know of a 3rd party utility to remove attachments from Outlook
>>> Express 6 emails? �One that is easy to use yet leaves a filename
>>> reference behind would be great. �Getting too many of those emails
>>> from friends and family with large attachments that have important
>>> information in the email that we'd like to keep. �But don't need to
>>> keep the attachments with the messages. �thx
>>
>>I often have a similar situation, swapping files for project
>>development back & forth as attachments. Only the final "product" is
>>of importance, but the mail body texts must be kept as part of the
>>development records.
>>
>>For this purpose, I use Mozilla Thunderbird Portable version 1.5.0.8
>>(20061025). Ironically, nothing handles the MS .dbx file format as
>>well as Mozilla does! The way I do it is to drop all the mails of
>>interest into one OE folder, then import that folder into TB. It
>>processes all the messages, separating off the attachment as separate
>>(but still associated) files. You can then delete attachments at will
>>and (perhaps) reimport the TB mail folder back into OE.
>>
>>Brian
>
>Oh, wow. I have TB, too, so this will be easy to try. Thanks. I'll
>report back.

Yikes. I have a much more recent version of TB, v2.0.0.21 (20090302),
and it was great except for 2 things:

- it didn't allow me to choose the folder I wanted, it imported ALL
the message store

- the folder where I copied the emails in question turned out to be
blank in the end!

So, obviously a couple of bugs to iron out. But since this might
work, I'll start looking at the TB angle. Perhaps a newer version of
portable TB will work or maybe there's an add-on. Anyway, will report
back as this info might help someone else down the road, too.

From: Johnw on 14 Oct 2009 07:14

Fairfax wrote on 14/10/2009 :
> Outlook is my primary email client in many ways but I hardly use
> it now because YahooPOPs! stopped working properly a long time ago.
> But until such time as I find an alternative to YPs!

I use FreePOPs
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/FreePOPs.shtml
http://www.freepops.org/en/
Tutorial
http://www.freepops.org/en/tutorial/index.shtml
http://www.freepops.org/en/tutorial/
Forum
http://freepops.diludovico.it/

From: Fairfax on 14 Oct 2009 08:33

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:14:14 +0800, Johnw <jmatt(a)webace.com.au> wrote:

>Fairfax wrote on 14/10/2009 :
>> Outlook is my primary email client in many ways but I hardly use
>> it now because YahooPOPs! stopped working properly a long time ago.
>> But until such time as I find an alternative to YPs!
>
>I use FreePOPs
>http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/FreePOPs.shtml
>http://www.freepops.org/en/
>Tutorial
>http://www.freepops.org/en/tutorial/index.shtml
>http://www.freepops.org/en/tutorial/
>Forum
>http://freepops.diludovico.it/

Yeah, thanks for the links. I've tried FreePOPS a few times and still
not getting emails into my Outlook. But it's time to give it another
go. thx

From: Fairfax on 14 Oct 2009 10:03

On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:59:19 -0700 (PDT), "Brian (Groups)"
<usspskghws(a)mailinator.com> wrote:

>On Oct 14, 2:09�am, Fairfax <Spam...(a)NoJunkMail.org> wrote:
>> Anyone know of a 3rd party utility to remove attachments from Outlook
>> Express 6 emails? �One that is easy to use yet leaves a filename
>> reference behind would be great. �Getting too many of those emails
>> from friends and family with large attachments that have important
>> information in the email that we'd like to keep. �But don't need to
>> keep the attachments with the messages. �thx
>
>I often have a similar situation, swapping files for project
>development back & forth as attachments. Only the final "product" is
>of importance, but the mail body texts must be kept as part of the
>development records.
>
>For this purpose, I use Mozilla Thunderbird Portable version 1.5.0.8
>(20061025). Ironically, nothing handles the MS .dbx file format as
>well as Mozilla does! The way I do it is to drop all the mails of
>interest into one OE folder, then import that folder into TB. It
>processes all the messages, separating off the attachment as separate
>(but still associated) files. You can then delete attachments at will
>and (perhaps) reimport the TB mail folder back into OE.
>
>Brian

Brian, yours was the _perfect_ solution. I can't believe how easy
it's turned out to be; so another case of perseverance paying off.

This needed 2 extensions, a custom button maker solution and an
import/export tool

Re the ButtonMaker extension, this is really cool and I just stumbled
upon it by accident this morning. It's incredible because you get to
pick and choose the buttons you want. Then you wait for a bit and
then download the resulting customized extension. The add-on is from
this ButtonMaker site here:
http://codefisher.org/toolbar_button/toolbar_button_maker

From that page I chose 3:
1. detach attachments

2. save attachments
3. delete attachments

I willl most likely always favour "detach attachment" because I like
the end results and the fact that it's a one-button process. But I
think that one probably needs all 3.

Detach attachment first off asks where to save the attachments to.
Once it does that, it asks to delete them. But the absolutely cool
thing is that the reference is unique -- at least in my OE6 once I
dumped the EML file back in, it looked like the files were there since
you see the same filename.jpg attachment as before but where OE shows
the picture as a display, it doesn't display as per normal, it shows a
broken image box, like you'd see on a webpage when the image is
incorrectly referenced or no longer there. Then there's the size.
Once you delete the attachments, the file goes down tremendously.

The email I tested this on a few times went from 4090 kb to 24 kb!
Awesome.

The other 2 buttons are self-explanatory, you can save and/or delete
the attachments.

These buttons work on all images, which might be unfortunate for some
but Thunderbird, unlike OE does allow you to delete attachments
manually so when you need to save and detach only some of the
attachments and not all, just do it in Thunderbird by right-clicking
on each image.

An added note, after installing this customized ButtonMaker buttons, I
customized only the open email toolbar rather than the main one. In
other words, I opened an email message _first_, then right-clicked >
CUSTOMIZE and added the buttons to that toolbar only. That means that
the buttons are available only to an open email message.

That takes care of the images. The next part was a fix to dealing
with the EML files from OE themselves. In Outlook Express, you just
have to drag a message to someplace like your desktop and then you
have an EML file.

Thunderbird is not so easy. I couldn't get this whole thing above to
work properly even by opening the file. It only worked correctly on
an imported file. But TB natively only imports your entire OE message
store and not individual files! So I looked for a solution. The
ImportExport Tool was the ticket:
https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

Once virus-scanned and installed, this extension adds this option to
the tools menu:

TOOLS > IMPORTEXPORT TOOLS > IMPORT EML FILE
(or you can choose the option to import all emal files from a
directory, etc., etc.)

So here's a re-cap of the the process:

1. Dump message from OE to someplace like desktop (comes out as EML
file).

2. Import EML into TB

3. Open message.

4. Press the DELETE ATTACHMENTS button in the toolbar, if that's the
one you need, then it does its thing by removing all attachments and
it leaves behind a file name for each picture, etc.

5. Close message.

6. Right-click on the closed message in TB and choose SAVE AS.

7. Save to desktop (comes out as an EML file).

8. Drag new EML into desired OE folder.

DONE.

Easy as pie. thx Brian.

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