I'm running Mojave 10.14.6, and lately when I try to trim the fat in my old emails, the attachments refuse to be removed. Sometimes it works, but with a delay of a few minutes; usually it doesn't work at all. When it works, it usually discards the entire email instead of just the attachments. What gives? It used to work as advertised.
iMac 27″, macOS 10.14
Hi Start with this...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
A further attempt succeeded, but what complication for something that ought to be a second's work. Having flagged the messages I just referred to - with no images in the body of the message but the whole thing still weighing as much as before - I went to my collection Flagged, selected them again and did Remove Attachments. Nothing seemed to happen. After a few minutes I quit Mail and restarted it - the phantom weight was gone. Like trying to get a piece of static-charged cellophane off your clothes or your fingers.
Workarounds are one thing, but I'm no tech wizard, nor am I interested for itself in the technical side of computers. What bugs me is that it seems I've got to do a lot just to be able to do the work I have in mind.
I think the Safe boot helped, but taking 20 minutes may be a sign of a failing HDD.
You can use Drive DX to possibly get a better view of Drive health…
A little update: I happened to find five of the emails that disappeared when I tried to remove the attachments - I had flagged them in my email so as to easily find these items I knew I could sacrifice to a possibly destructive test. I found them there with the Flagged group. This time I selected them and chose "remove attachments" - the emails seemed to disappear at first, but then came back, divested. Go figure, as Kurt Vonnegut often said.
This is a bit of a mess, and it ought to be within the powers of Apple to fix it. Didn't use to be this way!
10 minutes? More like 20. Anyhow, after doing the safe boot, Mail's behavior was the same - emails selected to have their attachments removed were removed along with the attachments - which of course is not the idea. Many thanks anyway - I suppose it did some good. But I have to reintroduce my Wacom to my iMac, as the iMac is pretending not to recognize the tablet.
Thanks for the tip about Drive DX. I have checked it out briefly, and it may be useful (though not free of charge), but my initial reaction was "sigh! another thing to get, to do!"
The machine is eight years old, true, but hasn't showed signs of instability (unlike me lately). I just ran Disk Utility on all three levels of the drive, and everything checked out all right.
Back to the unremovable attachments, I tried with a few more emails, and they had their attachments "removed", but only from the body of the email itself - the weight of the email remained as before. Even after quitting and reopening Mail. Phantom weight? It's a shame to be a lean and fit 150-pounder when you still look like a battleship.
Great work my friend, thanks for the report! :)
Apple Mail - Remove Attachments not working
