Big Sur Mail Attachment Paperclip Icon Missing

I just discovered if you bring up the contextual menu, there you can select what column headings you wish to appear. You have to have your mouse pointer in the column header area in order for the contextual menu to appearl

Not only does my mail program not show the attachments icon, I have lost the display of the column headings. Here are pics of my junk folder showing the Sort by options in the drop down menu. And I also have a picture of the menu under Mail > View. Anyone else have these same settings?

I have displayed the "attachments" COLUMN but messages with attachments STILL don't have a paperclip next to them - no way to see (in the Message Viewer) which messages have attachments???? (I turned on the FLAGS column and that DOES work.) The bottom message (and perhaps several others) HAS AN ATTACHMENT. WTF?

I have this problem already since High Sierra with pop3, on all machines (MB Air, MB Pro, iMac).

Made an official complaint when I bought my Macbook Pro last year, Apple confirmed the problem but nothing ever happened with it after that.

I landed here because I had the same problem, or that's what I thought. When I saw the comment about the flag icon also missing, I selected a message and toggled a flag on and off. I first I completely missed it, but the flag icon WAS there, only in a different spot--under the date--and nearly invisible in dark mode. I then looked at the same spot in other messages in the column, and saw the paperclip icons but so small and faint that I had missed them before that. Not sure why the flag and paperclip icons were moved and shrunk and dimmed, but they are there (iMac, Big Sur, dark mode, Mail 14.0, default view).

I tried different settings hoping to duplicate your issue and was unsuccessful. Could you provide your settings, maybe a screenshot (of the header paper clip icon and a couple of the emails that you know have attachments, but aren't indicating attachments). Maybe if we can "see" what you are looking at someone will figure it out.

I'm running macOS Catalina 10.15.7 (latest version) and I cannot get the attachment icon to appear. When I right click the columns heading, the only option available is to sort by a different factor such as date, attachment, To, From, etc. But I cannot find a way to include a column showing the attachment icon.

Well, what do you know. As I look through several of my emails, I am having ta similar issue and hadn't noticed. Some are showing up in the paper clip column as attachments and from what I can tell, they are not appearing if the sender is using Windows. I have one client who is a Mac user and his attachments appear in the paperclip column. Others—who I know are using Windows—are not showing up.

Have you tried sending an email with an attachment to yourself to see if that shows up? I could be wrong on my theory . . .

When I check for a software update, my Mac says that Catalina is the latest version. Maybe it's because of the age as it's a first gen Retina from Mid 2012. I didn't realize that I wasn't running the latest version. Thanks all.

Another experiment: All my email accounts are POP3. I created an IMAP version for one. Sent an email to that IMAP account with attachment, and the paperclip icon did show up in the attachments column, so evidently this is an issue with POP3 email.

By chance are your email accounts POP3 also?

I was searching because I noticed the same problem. I'm on Big Sur and all my accounts are POP. I recently migrated from Outlook for Mac and was trying to replicate the look by using columns views. I do have the column headings and added the attachment column but they show empty for all my emails even the ones with attachments.

I have the same problem, and adding the attachments column in context layout does not help. I also have a pop account. The system doesn't seem to recognize the existence of attachments--with one exception: if I send an attachment, the paperclip icon shows up on my sent message. This is not the case for any messages I've received with attachments. Something isn't "reading" their existence. When I reported the problem, apple support suggested making a dummy user and reloading email there to see if it was any different (it's not). The second suggestion was to boot in safe mode and see if I could see the paperclip there; I haven't tried that yet. It sounds to me like an iOS issue (I have Big Sur 11.2) and there should be a fix for it.

I tried the Safe Boot thing. Did not help. (I note if I click on the paperclip icon at the top of the column, it sorts the inbox by messages with and without attachments - and there are A FEW where paper clips DO show up. But very few compared to the number of messages with attachments and no paperclip.)

Safe Mode didn't help with the performance problem either. What performance problem, you ask?

I can hit the down arrow 10 times in 1.5 seconds. Under Catalina, Mail just kept up. Now, it takes 5 seconds until the 10th message is selected.

When I retrieve mail - It only seems to be able to download max 2 messages per second. Under Catalina it retrieved mail MUCH faster.

I had the missing paperclip issue when I first installed Big Sur (on release). I turned off 'Column View' under the View dropdown and then turned it back on - myriad paperclips (in their own column) ever since. I have not experienced any download queues.