Outlook 2010: deleting attachment

Topic

New Reply

Our office process requires us to pdf our documents and send them to recipients via email. With 2003, we used to open the sent email after it had gone, delete the pdf so it didn’t fill our mailboxes, but keep the email as proof that we had sent the file. With 2010, I can’t find any way of deleting the file from the email, without deleting the whole email, which is not what we want. Is there some magic way of deleting these files without deleting the email?

Reply | Quote

Replies

In Sent Items you should be able to select the email and then in the viewing pane right click the attachment and select “Remove Attachment”.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Tried that, but we don’t even get the option ‘Remove Attachment’. When I right click on the attachment, everything is greyed out except ‘Copy’ ‘Paste’ ‘Open’ ‘Print’ and ‘Save As’. The pdf file is sitting in the body of the email, not in the line under the recipients information. I can delete attachments from emails sent from Outlook 2003, and they even show the size of the file, which is very useful for us as we have a file size limit, but I don’t get either the file size or the option to delete with Outlook 2010. I have tried inserting the file in different ways, ie using the paperclip (attach file) (which was our normal way of doing it in 2003) and copying the pdf from explorer and pasting it into the email. Both methods insert the file into the body of the email, rendering it impossible to delete.

Reply | Quote

Just found out the reason – the emails were sent in Rich Text format, not HTML. Problem solved – thankyou

Reply | Quote

Glad you found it. Thanks for posting back.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

So what’s the answer?

Am I unable to delete attachments if the emails are rtf?

Reply | Quote

Question: After “Removing Attachment”, is the SPACE really recovered?

Look at the SIZE column for the message in Outlook before and after you remove the Attachment, it doesn’t change, what gives? This has irk’ed me for a long time. The only way I know of to knock down the SIZE column is to Forward myself the message which is a extra step and pain in the arse.

Reply | Quote

Question: After “Removing Attachment”, is the SPACE really recovered?

With plain text messages, you have to save the changed message before the space is recovered. I don’t usually remove attachments from HTML/RTF messages but assume it would be a similar situation.

(I should mention, in accordance with Joe’s question below about versions, I am referring to Outlook 2003)

Reply | Quote

Question: After “Removing Attachment”, is the SPACE really recovered?

Look at the SIZE column for the message in Outlook before and after you remove the Attachment, it doesn’t change, what gives? This has irk’ed me for a long time. The only way I know of to knock down the SIZE column is to Forward myself the message which is a extra step and pain in the arse.

On my PC with Outlook 2010 the size changes immediately when I remove an attachment. What version of Outlook are you running? Is it up-to-date with patches?

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote