Prev: what's a good audio cataloger?
Next: Help with DriveImage XML please.
From: Fairfax on 13 Oct 2009 11:09
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

From: Mike Easter on 13 Oct 2009 10:34
Fairfax 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

What exactly are you trying to do?

It sounds to me that you want to save the content of the body of an
email which might be plaintext or html - you didn't specify.

Further, it sounds like you want to save that content in the form of an
email which is 'buried' in the database of the OE storage system, ie in
a .dbx in a filefolder such as 'family.dbx' but you want the buried
..eml/.dbx to be stripped of some kind of unnamed attachment to the
unspecified html/rtf vs plaintext.

If it were me, I would be looking to do/save whatever it is you are
trying to do/save in some other way.

Some people save emails as a single mbox format item, such as .eml.


--
Mike Easter

From: VanguardLH on 13 Oct 2009 16:37
Fairfax 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

To keep your e-mail message store but keep any attachments they may have
in a separate file means using a program that filters your e-mails. It
would extract the attachment (which can be a time-consuming job since
all e-mail gets sent as text so the encoded MIME part carrying the
attachment's content would have to get decoded when that content was
saved into a file). For convenience, and assuming this program can be
configured to automatically extract and save attachments into a default
store folder, a link would be added into the e-mail so you could see
that, one, that e-mail had an attachment and, two, where that attachment
got saved.

MapiLab (http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/attachments_processor/) & Sperry
Software (http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook/Attachment-Save.asp)
have add-ons for Outlook to perform the auto-extract and save function.
Neither of those are free. http://www.kopf.com.br/ is free (note it's
from Brazil) but I never heard of it before doing a Google search due to
this thread. Of course, Outlook add-ons don't help you with Outlook
Express. From a Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bsave+%2Battachments+%2B%22outlook+express%22+%2Bfree

I saw some claimed free OE extractor utilities but the first few that I
looked at were those I wouldn't trust (one download site lists another
download site as the author's site yet that other site is owned by the
first download site, so you really don't know who is the author). I did
find http://www.ope2000.com/ which says "free to try" (it's a 30-day
expiring trial). You might find someone has a downloadable copy by
searching for it:

http://www.google.com/search?q=MidiGlass+Outlook+Express+Extraction+and+Macallan+Mail+Solution

According to http://www.insideoe.com/resources/tools.htm#macallan, there
was a free OE extractor; however, the web page they list is a squatter
that grabbed the defunct domain. The OE Help site lists an extractor
(but it isn't free):

http://www.oehelp.com/OEX/Default.aspx

However, there is no mention that a link is added into the e-mail to
show you there was an attachment and where it got put after extraction
and removal.

How often do you receive e-mails with attachments? It seems you could
use the functional trial version of OPE2000's extractor. Use it once on
your existing e-mails in OE to extract and remove attachments.
Thereafter, remember to edit your new e-mails to remove attachments as
they trickle in. However, you can remove attachments from e-mails only
when they are new (i.e., still in the Inbox). Once you move them to
another folder (by you or by a rule), you can't remove the attachment(s)
anymore (Remove gets disabled).

After doing the mass cleanup using the extractor utility, and when doing
the manual cleanup for new e-mails that arrive thereafter and while they
are still in your Inbox, double-click it to open in its own window.
Then right-click on an attachment or use the File -> Save Attachments
menu to save the attachments somewhere (probably the same place you
extracted the attachments from the old e-mails using the trial version
extractor program). After saving, right-click on the attachment in the
list and select Remove (it will be disabled if you moved the item from
the Inbox to a different folder). Alas, you won't be able to edit the
e-mail to insert a link to where you save the extracted attachment. So
be sure to name the extracted file to something that reminds to which
e-mail it belonged, like:

'<subject>' (from <sender> on <date>) <attachedfilename>

An e-mail from Susie Homewrecker, your mistress, with a subject line of
"Want me?" with an attachment of her tight bod in a string bikini
("do-me.jpg") would get the extracted file saved as:

'Want me?' (from Susie Homewrecker on 13-oct-09 7:44AM) do-me.jpg

Use the single quotes to delimit the Subject (which will probably have
spaces in it), and not double-quotes (which are used to enclose
filenames that contain spaces). You could leave out the single quotes
but it could get confusing if the Subject contained parenthesis or a
filename. Put whatever you want in the saved file's name that will let
you link it back to the e-mail to which it was originally attached.
While the above can result in a long filename, it does provide you the
means of associating that file to a particular e-mail (i.e., to that
sender who used that subject line and sent at that time).

You could use the trial version now for mass cleanup and then remember
to do manual cleanup as the new e-mails arrive. The folks in the OE
newsgroup might have some more suggestions:

microsoft.public.outlookexpress.general
From: VanguardLH on 13 Oct 2009 16:56
Something else to consider. OE6 is a 7-year old dead product.
Development ceased back in 2002 with only security updates since then
(with just one hack from SP-2 for Windows XP to change placement of
quoted content and signatures). Its development team was disbanded in
2006. The probably reason why you are concerned about extracting,
saving, and then removing attachments from e-mails is concern that you
will exceed the 2GB maximum size for OE's .dbx files. Well, you could
migrate to Windows Live Mail (WLM), the replacement for OE.

WLM doesn't save e-mails in database (.dbx) files. It saves each e-mail
in its own .eml file (and each newsgroup post goes into its own .nws
file). Both of these are text files (so saving them into a compressed
folder would save a lot of space but I haven't delved into that test
yet). Instead of using a database (which is quicker for access and
searches), WLM uses your operating system's file system (which is slower
to reindex or move files) to save the e-mails as files and uses an
indexing scheme to keep track of those e-mail files. As such, I don't
see there is a limit to the message store for WLM. While OE used
database files that had a 2GB max size, WLM saves to files so there is
no max size to its message store (beyond the max size allowed per file,
or per e-mail, within whatever file system used by your OS).

You might want to review posts in the WLM newsgroup to determine if you
might want to migrate to it as a replacement for OE:

microsoft.public.windows.live.mail.desktop
From: Mike Easter on 13 Oct 2009 16:59
VanguardLH wrote:

> Alas, you won't be able to edit the
> e-mail to insert a link to where you save the extracted attachment.

You could save the family mail item as an .eml, remove the attachment
and replace it with a link to the attachment, then copy the modified
..eml back to the family folder to get back into the .dbx. That is, one
would delete the original mail from its family folder.

But that is all by hand, not a utility, unless one wanted to write a
little progie/script.

Tho' it sounds like the OP was inclined to just discard the attachment/s
or even do without any linkage between attachment and mailbody.

Fairfax wrote:
> information in the email that we'd like to keep. But don't need to
> keep the attachments with the messages.




--
Mike Easter

 |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Prev: what's a good audio cataloger?
Next: Help with DriveImage XML please.