I use gmail through Safari. Quite suddenly, gmail won't attach files to email. Tried the suggested purges without effect. Switched to Chrome. No luck. Switched to Firefox, which allows the attachments. Restarted from cold. Any idea as to solution?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.14
Hi again Johnro,
If you're unable to start in safe mode, ensure that any peripheral devices are physically disconnected from your Mac before testing again.
Before reinstalling macOS, we can also recommend checking to see if there's a software update for your device to the latest version of macOS.
If so, you'll want to back up your data before attempting to update. Here's a guide to help:
How to update the software on your Mac
Have a great day!
Hi again Johnro,
If you're unable to start in safe mode, ensure that any peripheral devices are physically disconnected from your Mac before testing again.
Before reinstalling macOS, we can also recommend checking to see if there's a software update for your device to the latest version of macOS.
If so, you'll want to back up your data before attempting to update. Here's a guide to help:
How to update the software on your Mac
Have a great day!
Hi Johnro,
We'll point you in the right direction for help with this issue attaching files to your email in Safari. We're glad to look into it with you.
So that we're on the same page, what's the exact behavior you're seeing? Are you noticing any specific error messages when attempting to attach a file?
You mentioned having completed several troubleshooting steps. Which steps did you complete exactly in Safari?
Let us know if the information in this guide helps:
We're here for you if you've got any questions.
Hi Johnro,
Thanks for the details. To ensure we understand correctly, is this also occurring when you use Google Chrome web browser?
Let's test if the issue persists in safe mode. This will help to isolate the issue further to some installed login item or cached data. This guide has the steps to start up in safe mode:
How to use safe mode on your Mac
If the issue doesn't occur in safe mode, you'll want to follow the steps in this guide to test your login items:
Remove login items to resolve startup problems on your Mac
Otherwise, if the issue continues to occur, the next step is to create a temporary new test user account to see if it's occurring system-wide. This guide can walk you through those steps to test in a new user:
Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac
If you find it's also occurring in a new user account, we can recommend reinstalling macOS at that point. First, be sure you've created a backup of your important data. This guide can help with that:
Back up your Mac with Time Machine
Once your data is safely backed up, you may follow these instructions to reinstall macOS:
We're here for you if you've got any questions!
Have a great day.
shut down, restarted.
read Apple suggestions; cleared caches; one Safari extension: 1Password7.7
Called Apple phone support. Retried all the stuff I'd done before.
Support called it 'truly puzzling' and said maybe I should reinstall the OS
Attachments work fine on FireFox. I haven't tried Chrome. I did try the safe mode restart. It doesn't work. My MacBook Air usually takes about a minute to start up from cold. A restart in safe mode produced a gray line that seemed to finish after 2:20, but then nothing happened. I quit holding at 8:00, let it sit for another minute, then shut it down. I'll try a reinstall, then go back to FireFox if that doesn't work.
I meant to thank you for your help, but I made a snide remark that apparently got under the censor's extraordinarily thin skin. Suffice it to say that you have been a great backstop to Apple's software and Apple's human support, and I appreciate it.
This has been a common issue since 14.0.1 was released. I'm still at v14.0. I've just been waiting to update and using an alternative browser until then. I see 14.0.2 didn't fix. That said, my software update shows BOTH 14.0.1 and 14.0.2 needs installed. Never seen one Safari be needed to install the other before.
This is happening to me also even after updating safari to 14.02
I'm having the problem others have- safari won't attach a file in gmail, even after I updated safari to 14.02
I ended up reinstalling OS ... not upgrading ... and the problem disappeared.
Safari stopped letting gmail use attachments
