Mail was unable to save the attachment

+1

Same issue for me since Snow Leopard. When I'm composing an e-mail and I attach a Word Document, I can't click on the attachment and view it. I get the "Mail was unable to save the attachment...check you downloads folder" mentioned in this thread.

Hope to see this fixed as I often attach a file to an e-mail and click it to double check that I've attached the right thing.

Same problem here. I attach a file to a mail message, and when I try to open it from mail (to make sure it's the right version of the attachment), I get:

Mail was unable to save the attachment " ___" to disk. Verify that your downloads folder exists and is writable.

I don't like to say the same but I'm experiencing the same problem. Normally is not in creating new Mail but in trying so save attachments which I received.
My workaround: I start Thunderbird, I download the attachment and than I restart apple Mail 🙂

+1, same here. .doc files, added to an in-composition email, click and get the same exact error.

Tried setting the "Everyone" permissions to read/write, no effect.

Gonna do a repair perms on the drive now and see if that has an effect.

Called Applecare today, and told them the problem, was put to 2nd line support, who was unable to help. He repaired perm's booting from Snow Leopard install disc to no avail. Suggested I contacted Microsoft. :o)

Permission Repair did nothing.

Strangely, a test mail I had open for a while - touched the attachment and it opened! So I did another test, thinking that it was fixed... no dice. Now downloading the Office update to see if that has any affect (not optimistic).

@ update: the "Microsoft has a critical update for you" came up with the auto-update checker. I don't know how to kick off an update check like in OSX.

@ downloads: we tried the normal downloads folder, desktop, a custom folder ... tried permissioning it as wide open to everyone, it didn't matter.

At Mail Preferences/General what is selected with regard to the Downloads folder should be folder named "Mail Downloads" for best results. In the Finder, open Home/Library and locate whether there is a folder named Mail Downloads?

Ernie

bear in mind this is not attachments... when doing this from an inbound email or anything else, it all works great. It's only when you're composing a mail and then try to open an attachment ... and I think that the default behavior for a dragged-off attachment is the downloads dir rather than mail downloads, but I could be completely off my rocker here.

Ed,

I don't think it should need either for adding an attachment, but there are many reports of similar nature, although I have not experienced it at all.

However, the Mail Downloads folder has often been the source of confusion to people who have found it, because it makes them think it is the location where attachments are saved -- this is not the case, but was created to provide a point of storage for editing an attachment and sending back to the original sender, and any edited version can be saved there, but the copy with the original message is not altered -- Mail Preferences can be set to remove all unedited files from the Mail Downloads folder whenever closing Mail, etc.

Some of the confusion with the Mail Downloads folder is that attachments that are looked at with Quick View also go into it, and which means Quick View has some of the status of a third party app in the same way as, say, Photoshop.

The Downloads folder is most often used when downloading from within your Browser, but if an email message is HTML, then clicking to download from some link in that message would likely go the Downloads folder.

Ernie

I helped a customer with this issue today regarding not being able to open a .doc attachment after attaching the file

We could open it after sending the mail to his account and receiving it but could not open it while composing the email after attaching the file.

The .doc file was originally created in microsoft word for mac. We instead opened the file in Pages, saved as a .doc to the desktop. We could then attach/open this file just fine.

There is something in Microsoft word that is causing this issue. As far as other file types (jpeg, gif, etc..) take a closer look at what applications you are creating/saving them in. Try to open them in an apple-based application and saving the file then see if it behaves appropriately.

Best of luck guys!

Having the same "cannot save to disk" error. However, I find that attachments do go out. But I am also having trouble with jpegs. I send a jpeg with certain dimensions to show on projector, and mail program makes the jpegs smaller. A width of 1024 was sent and became a width of 284 when received. Tried sending files to myself and got the same results.

It never happened before I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

I'm having the same problem when I attach photographs to email and try to open them by double clicking on email, I get the same error. But messages do send at whatever size (small, medium, large, actual size) selected at bottom of email.

Ernie Stamper wrote:
OT,

As you may have seen, I have filed a bug report for the issue with the Compose window.

Hi Ernie,

Do you know if there's a fix for this yet (the one with the compose window), I have a customer with this problem. Have updated the office apps to 12.2.1 but still the same issue.

thanks,
Richard.

Richard,

I don't think so, but I was notified that my bug report had been determined to be the same issue as another report, so it had been consolidated with the other. Thus I lost my quick check of status, and I haven't gone through the path to check status of a report that is not my own. I will try to check that as time allows.

Ernie