How can I prevent mail attachments embedding when sending mail

This is a problem for images of products to our customer service staff from marketing staff.

It is not a Microsoft Outlook/Exchange problem. Customer Service is using Lotus Notes.

Send Windows Friendly Attachments is a joke. Setting Notes Preferences to Show inline MIME images as attachments doesn't work either. Maybe the images are not valid MIME images being inlined.(?)

Why doesn't Apple fix this? Is it that hard?

Lotus Notes is an antiquated program, and I doubt that Apple gives much thought there. I know from testing that the use of Attachment Tamer will solve the problem for Lotus Notes, because it prevents the Inline disposition from being used, and it is the problem of Lotus Notes trying to render the attachment inline.

Interestingly, I am fairly sure that if you take a message not behaving as desired in Lotus Notes, and Forward it, the forwarded copy will work on at least other platforms.

Ernie

Btw, I personally do not use Attachment Tamer, and have no benefit from the recommendation.

My wife has Apple and iEverything. I am on Windows. She needs to email jpg's and other graphics professionally. Also, we understand that Apple is the computer to use for folks in the arts and graphic design, way over Windows.

I find it amazing and incredible that there is NO WAY for her to attach a jpg to an email in Apple or iOS - ALL of her emails have the pictures embedded instead of attached. This is completely wrong, unprofessional and profoundly stupid. There is NO JUSTIFICATION for Apple making it impossible to attach a picture file to an email.

As a non-Apple person, I find the "dumbing down" ethos of Apple to be annoying and condescending. This is a perfect example. Thank God for plain old Windows, the OS to use for business.

I find it amazing and incredible that there is NO WAY for her to attach a jpg to an email in Apple or iOS - ALL of her emails have the pictures embedded instead of attached. This is completely wrong, unprofessional and profoundly stupid. There is NO JUSTIFICATION for Apple making it impossible to attach a picture file to an email.

It is neither amazing nor incredible nor impossible. Attach the image and it is attached. How someone else's email client treats attachements is up to that email client. If they are using Outlook, then they are stuck with the crappy results it gives. Outlook can't handle what Microsoft refers to as, "Internet email." It can only handle Exchange email, well. Anything else is an enigma to their software engineers.

It's not up to apple to find workarounds for bugs in Microsoft software, which this is.

Just Zip your jpgs and the problem goes away

I pointed out the problem shows up in mail received by Lotus Notes, and Notes is derided as being antiquated or whatever it was. The next person points out the flaw as being unprofessionally handled by Apple, and MS Outlook is attacked by another Apple user/board member. Instead of attacking every other product in the computing world, let's admit the attachment handling is flawed. Not everyone in the world is having Christmas saved by Apple. They are not infallible. TCP/IP won out over Appletalk in business didn't it?

The reason MS is so often pointed to, is that Outlook can have a similar problem with Rich Text from Outlook Express (and vice-versa), where no Mac is involved.

I do not give Apple a complete Pass on this issue, but it is largely what happens on the PC end that fools the system into not seeing an attachment. What Mail attaches is a true attachment, however.

As I pointed out (despite the derisive comment about LN), Attachment Tamer can usually solve the problem, although I can successfully send without using it.

Ernie

Kevin - by all means please seal yourself up in your Apple walled garden and pretend that most of the world doesn't run on Windows.

Let me describe the true nature of this problem - a big fat FAIL from holier-than-thou Apple.

Apple mis-designs its email to make it impossible to attach a jpg to an email - an utterly basic computing task - and you think that's justified because (as you assert) there's something wrong with Outlook, Outlook Express, Notes, ... (how long is this list exactly?)

This issue is merely an annoyance, but if your attitude were to be scaled up, you'd be a religious fanatic ready to burn the heretics. Remember the old Apple 1984 commercial? I think Steve Jobs was projecting his own way of thinking.

Do some research, this is a microsoft bug, might not be what you want to hear but its a fact

Send me you email (click on my name to the left to find address in the bio line of the resulting Profile) and I will email a properly attached JPG to your PC with nothing but Mail.

Ernie

Ernie - I accept you can do it, but how? Please advise how to do this on a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone. I'll send the directions to my wife. And you'll have answered this post of 14 pages.

I have experimented extensively with this issue. It is related to the recipitants email app, but in previous versions of Mail could be made successful by clicking on Format/Make Plain Text prior to sending. In Mail in Lion, ML, and now Mavericks this change does not stick, and the message utlimately gets sent in Rich Text/HTML which is why the MS apps have problems.

The Make Plain Text strangely enough endures if you add a Signature following the attachments that is EMPTY but composed as text only plain text. This 'tricks" Mail and OSX to not change it back. I cooresponded with Apple engineering about this, and they say the use of Rich Text is necessary and helpful with Exchange Accounts. But this does not help the many who are not in Exchange Account Situations.

The use of Attachment Tamer in general can help this, but I don't use it, and it is not clear to me how it would work when invoking Mail sending from within Aperture (or iPhoto which suffers the same issue).

I have not experimented with this issue in iOS devices, and was not aware of it being a problem there. But it may be the same issue.

A similar issue can be found not involving Apple devices -- see:

http://forums.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s4/364477-cant-receive-email-att achments-when-sent-using-rtf.html

Also note the instructions MS has for formats to send messages (not that this is helpful to a message you receive):

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/change-the-message-format-to-html -rich-text-or-plain-text-HP001232996.aspx

Apparently Exchange networks complcate the design of email formats, and I believe there are ways to actually find the supposedly embedded attachments, but I am not currectly using any PCs to experiment with. If you you would, take one of the messages from your wife that you PC find problematic, and use the command to send again. Observe whether the newly composed messages show the attachment.

Ernie

Hi there, having joined this throng over a year ago with the same issue, I am sorry to see that nothing has changed in the tone or content of the this dialogue.

However, for what it is worth, I personally felt there were bigger things to worry about (eg how to use Windows 8 - yep I could not afford any of the Mac laptops as well as my iMac!! 😉). So I paid the small amount of cash for Attachment Tamer over a year ago and it has worked perfectly with no glitches ever since. It just sits in the background (most of the time I forget it is there) doing it's thing.

One can be purist about this and expect Apple to do everything perfectly all the time. In my experience this is like rocking horse poo! The reality is that majority of what Apple does is close to perfect most of the time. That's good enough for me.

For the odd quirky things that do not work lets be glad that there are other innovators who want fill those (small) gaps. Another good example is Pathfinder as a replacement for Finder. Personally I could never cope with the frsutration caused by a file manager that was so locked down and restrictive. Enter Pathfinder which I have been using for over 2 years and frankly makes a mockery of anything Apple or Microsoft have ever served up!

It's all about choice. You can choose to rant against the system(s), or take a handy available solution and move onto the bigger more important battles.

Hope this helps, 🙂

PS the 3rd party fix also works for Microsoft stuff - just discovered Dexpot yesterday that allows you to create virtual desktops on a pc - ie like on Macs. It works fine and now I have one frustration less with my Windows pc - small hurrah.

Dutiful and others,

Easy FIX on Mac is Zipping the JPGs (control-clicking some selected JPGs and choosing "compress"). Since Attachment Tamer also makes JPGs no longer displayed, it is akin to automating this.

I often send clients their photos both as small "attached" JPG to see in email, and larger "compressed" one to save and use. For several large files one must DropBox anywway.

Kevin Neal wrote:

It's not up to apple to find workarounds for bugs in Microsoft software, which this is.

Just Zip your jpgs and the problem goes away

I don't think it is MS software. I use web-based Gmail to receive email from iPhone users, and their photos are rendered in full size in the body of the email.

I look at the message source and I see:

--Apple-Mail-30688B48-76A2-44A5-xxxx

Content-Type: image/jpeg;

name=image.jpeg

Content-Disposition: inline;

filename=image.jpeg

Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Content-Id: <F55B9AB5-79DC-40C5-88B8-xxxx>