Mail.app- 'Remove Attachments' corrupting mails

Joseph, I am having this exact issue. Did you in fact start another thread or have you learned anything new?

Rick, I didn't start another thread as I am not sure where I would do so.

Thanks for the note.

I'm using the Mac Mail app on my Mountain Lion Macbook Air.

It seems that message after message, when I take out attachments, Mail says that the attachments have been removed, but a lot of pieces of the email become .txt files at the end of the message.

Very frustrating.

Please let me know where it might be better off creating a new thread on this.

Thanks in advance.

-Screaming.Pict

The account that is corrupted is a pop account. I downloaded the mail, read the mail. when i removed attachment... all chinese fonts becomes corrupted. Totally unreadable. I changed to thunderbird. Am now thinking of going back to mail due to the ability to quicklook attachment. But I am not planning to remove attachment at all from mail.

Hi,

I can report that I also get corrupted messages after removing attachments with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and Apple Mail (4.5 1084). The mail server type is Exchange 2007.

The problem seems to arise in messages with additional German characters (umlauts,etc.), but it doesn't happen in every instance.

Thanks, Roy

Ugh. I've got the same issue as the original one, on 10.8.2, using Mail 6.2. I stopped using mail.app in favor of Outlook over a year ago because of this issue, but I just upgraded to Mountain Lion, figuring they must have fixed this by now. For the most part, I prefer mail over Outlook, but this is a deal-killer for me. I get 10 or 20 attachments/day that I need to remove to keep under my quota.

Not sure what to do, other than complain to Apple via bug reporter.

As far as narrowing down where this bug is, I don't think it has anything to do with Asian fonts. When I remove attachments, the email appears fine immediately (It replaces the attachment icon with a "this attachment has been manually removed" message). But if I look at a different folder and then go back to the message, it's gibberish. Also, the message appears corrupted on my iPhone as well, so it looks like mail did corrupt the message itself, not just the view (though it's different gibberish on the phone than on my Mac).

Great follow-up. Thanks for the tentative good news. Please keep us posted.

I have experienced this "garbage after removing attachment" issue since some time. I am now with OS X 10.8.4 and Mail 6.5, and still happens. Rebuilding mailboxes does not help. It started to happen with messages coming from a few specific Windows users, and totally unpredictable... but today it happened to me with one of the messages I had just sent out! Always normal latin fonts, perhaps with accents, but some without...

I leave aside the awkward fact that the menu item "Remove attachments" is not always available. Sometimes, with the same message in different machines but with the same OS (my account is an IMAP one, and I consult it from different machines, but always with Mail and keeping local copies), one machine does not allow you to remove attachments, and the other one does. It started to happen with Lion, and some time ago, one of the machines still had Snow Leopard, and this one always allowed removing attachments.

Any help would be appreciated. For outgoing messages, removing attachments is a must; otherwise, you will have two copies of the same file in your disk (i.e., if you sent out one file of yours, which you want to keep filed in its proper place).

Best,

This problem (removing attachments corrupting the text of the message) seems to have returned with a vengeance under Yosemite (Mail 8.0). I'm surprised more folks don't have this problem, especially as Apple has shrunk the default storage space for iCloud accounts, and as many sources counsel removing attachments from iCloud emails as a sure-fire way to manage storage space.

Has anyone been able to solve this problem with a different OS X mail client?

I have both these problems: the one described by Sreaming.Pict about gibberish after removing attachments and the one josephavellino mentions with the .txt files. I could live with the second problem, since these .txt files do not take up any space, but the first problem seems to be accelerating.

Over the years, I've seen this phenomenon once in a while, but now (under Yosemite and Mail 8) it appears every third time I try to remove an attachment or so.

I'm not using any Asian character coding, and I'm not on an Exchange server or anything like it.

From now on, I'll move messages to local mailboxes before trying to remove any attachments. Let's hope it works. My workaround up to now has been to make sure I reply to the original message (the one with the attachment) before removing attachments. Then I'll have the original text in my reply, at least.

Baah, I think the Mac is getting more and more littered with this kind of nagging bugs.

I am having the exact same problem with Mail.app 8.1 and Exchange Server.

Until Yosemite I never noticed anything odd. But now the issue spreads so rapidly that I need to find a fix or alternative within days. I am scared that it may retroactively affect all my email. Several observations:

1. Since Yosemite, "Remove attachment" is greyed out for any exchange email carrying an attachment, irrespective whether I am sender or recipient. To induce "Remove attachment" I thereof copy a POP/SMTP email from one of my other email accounts among them;
2. To help mitigate the issue, I began moving exchange email to a local folder before deleting attachments. This doesn't however seem to curb the issue. It occurs even among local email where attachments were deleted 6, 12 or 18 months ago and where previously which I never saw having any issue (but I may be mistaken and simply didn't notice earlier);
3. Affected are only email from where attachments where removed and where sender or at least 1 recipient use Exchange Server;
4. Email content is always preserved in “Raw source”;
5. Those weird characters (Chinese?) cannot be searched for;
6. "Rebuild database” is able to render some recent deletes legible again, but only when flagged and shown under the respective Flag colour. Interestingly, the same email remains illegible in its local folder. But if known text of that email is searched for, Mail renders an accurate full view in the local folder.

Any ideas?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5, 10.10.1