Note, Raasay1:
It’s not, per se, an Apple issue: Apple Mail still deals with these file attachments—and they have always been attachments, regardless how they may be rendered (displayed) by any given email client (software)—with full functionality of multi-attachment downloading.
The issue seems to have been narrowed down to an interaction between the Apple Mail composed email, being sent through a Microsoft Exchange server, to be viewed through a Microsoft Outlook client.
It is then at the Outlook client level that people seem to have their complaints.
Yes. There was a change at the Apple Mail client end.
Whether that change was simply changing the default email authoring format from plain-text to rich-text (which uses HTML, by the way), or Apple adopting a newer email standard, I do not know, yet. (Most people are not providing enough information to disentangle these two possibilities.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft is notorious for not keeping up with Internet standards…
In any case, the issue appears to be found strictly on Outlook clients.
Correct?
So, even though there are workarounds by changing intermediaries (such as sending the email out through a GMail server), the culprit is simply the Outlook email client: it appears to not give y’all the ability to save attached images en masse, at least under some conditions.
Isn’t that right?
This looks like an issue to be taken up with Microsoft, not with Apple, since Apple Mail doesn’t have this failing.
If anyone has any good contrary evidence, I would be greatly interested!