Attachements in Mail

Being new to Mail but an old hand (not an expert!) on Mac, I agree that Mail Attachment Iconizer does appear to fix some problems. I know Ernie does not agree that it changes the way attachments appear on a recipient's PC/Windows. Thanks to Ernie though for several good tips about how to handle attachments in Mail (plain text and no titles or spaces between attachments). To iconize the attachment onyour own Mac, you don't need 'iconizer'. just ctrl click the attachment and choose 'view as icon'. One of my main issues was to have it appear not pasted all over the recipient's email (running Windows), but appear as an attachment which you can choose to open or file with its original name. It appears to me that Mail Attachment Iconizier does fix that issue. One problem I have not been able to fix is having some attachments as icons and others not in the same email. Even if I set the preferences to 'always view as icons' over i.e. 20kb, all attachments in the same email show up as icons whether they are less than or more than the set file size. That is a small problem though. Thanks to Ernie, i2 and others, Mail now works a lot better for me. I really appreciate the Apple discussion groups, keep it up!

Ernie writes:' Mail Iconizer has no impact on what Mail will display in the received message --'. In the instructions for Mail Attachment Iconizer, you find the following statement: 'The difference is that with Mail Attachments Iconizer, Apple Mail will respect your choice, and send the attachment accordingly. Your settings are also respected when printing messages.'
I don't know why we have different experiences with Mail Iconizer. One issue I have with this plug-in app is that it doesn't confirm the chosen downsizing/file size under the icon when using the photo browser. It is, however, sent with the chosen file size. This I find a little irritating. Any suggestions other than creating the email from iPhoto?

Nepse wrote:
To iconize the attachment onyour own Mac, you don't need 'iconizer'. just ctrl click the attachment and choose 'view as icon'. {quote}

Yes for viewing on the sender's computer, but Iconizer sets the Content-Disposition to agree with how the sender has the image attachment displayed in the composed message and the receiving computer can decide how to display it.

This is a good discussion..I'm learning too!

My point was that when a message is sent to you or any Apple Mail user, you will see the image attachments View in Place irrespective of the use of Iconizer. I found the same to be true of Thunderbird operation on a PC with Vista. Thunderbird has a setting (at least on the PC) to choose whether to have attachment view Inline or not. That is what controls the functionality in that email client, and not the disposition header.

Much of what seems to happen with Windows recipients using Outlook or Outlook Express may be more related to placement of the attachment regardless of whether they view Inline, if Rich Text Format is utilized. Attachments are best placed last in the message, and Mail under Edit/Attachments has a setting to Insert All Attachments Last in the Message -- I recommend that setting and/or practice manually.

Vista at first had another version of MS email client, called Windows Mail, but now seems to have MS Outlook. I only allow Thunderbird to be used on my PC, and not any of the MS apps.

Mail Iconizer does change the header when you send, and have confirmed that Disposition: Inline will mess up the display of the message in Lotus Notes, but interestingly no impact if the message is then forwarded by the Lotus Notes user. Thus changing the header to Disposition: Attachment would help when sending to Lotus Notes users. Whether it has similar benefit for Outlook or Outlook Express recipients, separately from RTF vs Plain text, I have yet to personally confirm.

Ernie

Ernie Stamper wrote:
My point was that when a message is sent to you or any Apple Mail user, you will see the image attachments View in Place irrespective of the use of Iconizer.{quote}

I'm not sure how you have Iconizer set up or what the complete scenario is but when I send a message from my Mac Hotmail account with Iconizer set to "Apple Mail Default Behavior", the image attachment in the received message is displayed in line by Mail. When Iconizer is set to "Default Nice Behavior" I see the image attachment displayed in Mail as an icon when a message is received from Hotmail. Maybe it would work differently if I did the same test sending from a PC.

{quote} Attachments are best placed last in the message, and Mail under Edit/Attachments has a setting to Insert All Attachments Last in the Message -- I recommend that setting and/or practice manually.{quote}

I think Iconizer insures this is the case. There apparently are other things that Iconizer automatically takes care of that I don't want to deal with when I encounter them. So I believe that the designer is very knowleagable in mail protocols and tried to incorporate as much as possible to fix annoyances in Mail and lack of capability in the variety of PC email clients.

Vista at first had another version of MS email client, called Windows Mail, but now seems to have MS Outlook. I only allow Thunderbird to be used on my PC, and not any of the MS apps.

Mail Iconizer does change the header when you send, and have confirmed that Disposition: Inline will mess up the display of the message in Lotus Notes, but interestingly no impact if the message is then forwarded by the Lotus Notes user. Thus changing the header to Disposition: Attachment would help when sending to Lotus Notes users. Whether it has similar benefit for Outlook or Outlook Express recipients, separately from RTF vs Plain text, I have yet to personally confirm.

Ernie

I would be delighted to receive a test message from you in which you believe the operation of Iconizer will prevent Mail from viewing in place the image files you attach. This was not the case with the other poster who tested with Iconizer, and wherein neither my Macs with Mail, nor my PC with Thunderbird failed to view them in place.

Ernie

Ernie Stamper wrote:
I would be delighted to receive a test message from you in which you believe the operation of Iconizer will prevent Mail from viewing in place the image files you attach. This was not the case with the other poster who tested with Iconizer, and wherein neither my Macs with Mail, nor my PC with Thunderbird failed to view them in place.

Ernie

This is interesting. Apparently Iconizer tries to "display attachments as they were sent" (see the Preferences panel) but may not be successful in all cases. So it's not on the sending end but the receiving end. The recipient's email client determines how the attachments are displayed. When I ran my test, I sent the message from my Hotmail web account not the Mail client so Iconizer isn't a factor in the message composition. I received it in the Mail client. So it is perhaps the way Iconizer sets Mail to display image attachments (i.e., setting "view as Icon"). I tried it both with Iconizer set to "Apple Mail Default Behavior" and "Default Nice Behavior" to see the different behavior. I would be interested to see if you get the same result by sending a message from your Mac and from PC and receiving the message in your Mac Mail with Iconizer set to "Default Nice Behavior".

Ah! As I read about Iconizer, I was suspicious the behavior could be changed for the receiving Mac if Iconizer is installed.

I will not have Iconizer installed on my Mac, so any test can only be with the reaction of Mail (and Thunderbird on the PC) to a message sent by someone using Iconizer.

Ernie

I am fully aware of the fact that with Mac I can decide how to view the attachment as icon or in line both when sending and receiving. As I have stressed, my biggest problem has been when sending to PCs running Vista. The attachment has only showed up in line (pasted in the email) when sending without Mail Attachment Iconizer. Some find this annoying. It seemed to help when using plain text. According to my recipients, there is a difference, however, sending with this plug-in, choosing the attachments to be 'iconized' in the preferences. I understand that you disagree with the claims of the developer of Mail Attachment Iconizer. It is certainly your privilege, and since my recipients by no means (like most) are no computer experts, I can't guarantee that changing their settings may influence the way attachments are received. I prefer knowing that they don't have to in order to receive my attachments in a normal manner. That is why I would recommend this app to others with the same problems.
• allows you to always display (and print) images, PDFs, audio and video as icons with an optional file size limit and exceptions;
• can ensure that image files are sent as regular attachments unless you want them to appear in place improving compatibility with MS Outlook;
• can ensure that image files are sent embedded in HTML layout;
prevents superfluous “ATT000x” attachments (ATT0001.htm, ATT0001.txt, ATT0002.htm, etc.) when using a MS Exchange server or sending to a MS Outlook user if you put attachments at the end of message;
• allows you to always display full attachment names regardless of length instead of truncated names with ellipsis (…);
• lets you set a default size for automatic image resizing to prevent unwanted image resizing.

As far as I am concerned, I feel no need to continue this discussion. Help from Ernie, i2 and buying this plug-in seem to have solved my problems. Thanks to all of you for contributing.

Nepse wrote:
I understand that you disagree with the claims of the developer of Mail Attachment Iconizer. It is certainly your privilege, and since my recipients by no means (like most) are no computer experts, I can't guarantee that changing their settings may influence the way attachments are received. I prefer knowing that they don't have to in order to receive my attachments in a normal manner. That is why I would recommend this app to others with the same problems.

Nepse,

Your post shows as a reply to one of my posts. But I think you meant to reply to a different one since my posts advocate how nice this little app is. Since I found Iconizer, I wouldn't leave home without it!

i2

Hi,

Your most recent test messages were observed on two Macs, one PC using Thunderbird as the email client, and on my iPad. On none of those platforms was any image prevented from viewing in place -- this included the PC, where if the setting to allow Inline View was on, the photo was rendered in the message. On the PC, there still were extraneous attachments named in the form Part 1.x.

I think it is not possible to determine the impact of Mail Iconizer on recipients if you have it installed on your computer.

I will email a screen shot of the message as seen on my Mac, where the photo header clearly has the Content-Disposition: Attachment change -- it nevertheless will View in Place.

Ernie

Ernie Stamper wrote:
Hi,

Your most recent test messages were observed on two Macs, one PC using Thunderbird as the email client, and on my iPad. On none of those platforms was any image prevented from viewing in place -- this included the PC, where if the setting to allow Inline View was on, the photo was rendered in the message. On the PC, there still were extraneous attachments named in the form Part 1.x.

As I understand what you are saying, you are observing that with Iconizer installed on the sending computer a receiving Mac without Iconizer installed displays an image attachment in place. I wouldn't expect you to see the image displayed as an icon unless you had Iconizer installed on your Macs. That is the Mail default behavior. And who knows how the iPad and PC handle received attachments.

According to Iconizer Help for the following Preferences option settings - PDF documents, Images, Audio Files, and Video files: "By default Mail displays all images, one-page PDF documents, audio and video files directly in the message. Using this option you can instead have these files displayed as icons..."

{quote} I think it is not possible to determine the impact of Mail Iconizer on recipients if you have it installed on your computer.{quote}

Yes in general, especially after so much massaging of your message after it leaves your computer, goes through mail servers, is compressed, is decompressed, is scanned for virues etc. And is there HTML content in the message? And then the variety of email programs at the receiving end have to be designed to decipher the message properly. But there were cases where I sent email to PC's that resulted in attachment files that could not be opened or saved. With Iconizer that problem went away. And I tried the usual work around of sending plain text and putting attachment at end of text.

This has been a great thread. It was good to hear what experiences others have had with the attachment issue. Perhaps the biggest challenge is understanding the complexity of how attachments are processed in email messages. But this is beyond where I want to go. So I'm happy with letting Iconizer do the work where it can. It would be nice to have the Iconizer author join in and straighten all of us out on what Iconizer can and cannot do.

If the effect of Iconizer is to be mainly cosmetic, how should we expect it to help in sending to the tech challenged PC users you are trying to reach? Nothing in their sales pitch would lead us to expect less than to help you reach those using Windows, if it is to meet its purpose?

Ernie

It sounds like I fall in the same category as you i2. Whether Mail Attachment Iconizer keeps all the developer's promises in all situations with the different apps, is not crucial to me. Ernie is obviously at least one level above me when it comes to computer software knowledge. I do know more about attachments after this discussion though!

I agree that it would have been better if the developer of MAI had taken part in this, but he/she/they would likely also be using terms and referring to apps which I am not familiar with. I lack experience with PC's, but so far recipients of my emails are happy the way the attachments show up after installing MAI. That is what counts. If they start complaining again, I may have to call on Ernie! Again thanks to both of you from a cold and wintery Norway!

Ernie Stamper wrote:
If the effect of Iconizer is to be mainly cosmetic, how should we expect it to help in sending to the tech challenged PC users you are trying to reach? Nothing in their sales pitch would lead us to expect less than to help you reach those using Windows, if it is to meet its purpose?

Ernie

If you are encountering specific problems with sending email to a PC or have any questions or complaints, why don't you pass them on to the author of Iconizer, Adam Nohejl? I'm sure he would like to have an opportunity to correct any problems or explain to you why he can't. This will benefit all of us if we run into the problems you are having.

This is what their website says so hopefully you can find out what is going on with your particular problems.

"Lokiware makes software for Mac OS X. What we value the most is you, the customer, your needs and opinions, whether you use our free or commercial products. Should you need help or have any questions, comments or ideas, let us know. You will get in touch with a real person."

Keep us posted!

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