Saving an Email as RTFD looses attachments

iCoco wrote:

So to make a long story short: Until Snow Leo I was able to save any email with attachment as RTFD file. Since Lion this doesn't work properly any more. I don't see any other reason why Apple dropped this ability than just a bug. So I'm just hoping that they repair the bug.

No bug. Must be the way you are handling your system.

iCoco wrote:

"I guess it never dawned on anyone else to save email via drag and drop? Drag the messages from MESSAGE LIST column to your desktop. Later I move them from there to a folder via Finder. When done that way it includes all attachemtns as well as the message."

Oh yes, I know this. But that is not what I want to do. What I want is to save emails in the rather universal file format RTF(D). Some for exchanging them with people who don't want EML-format for whatever reason, and some for archieving purposes. After I switched from Windows to the Mac, I got a real issue because many old emails were saved as proprietary windows mail files (.msg). Still today I encounter such files that I can't open any more because they were saved in that format. I don't want this to happen again in the future.

So to make a long story short: Until Snow Leo I was able to save any email with attachment as RTFD file. Since Lion this doesn't work properly any more. I don't see any other reason why Apple dropped this ability than just a bug. So I'm just hoping that they repair the bug.

Well I see where your problem is. RTFD IS NOT A UNIVERSAL FORMAT, It is quite restricted to Apple.

Perhaps this URL will explain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format_Directory

Until you understand that a lot of the majic of the Apple OS makes no sense. I can see why Apple says there is no bug. You and Apple see the same word but have two completely different undestandings of what the word means. As a matterof fact without knowing that my orginal post makes no sense to the casual reader coming from Windows. RTFD and Web Archive are very similar to ePub, but they are Apple standards.

ePub is universal and coming on strong as a standard for viewing documents on various size screens including the ultra tiny ones like on a iPhone across all platforms but it performs best as ePub 3 on Apple iPad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

Amazon has a proprietary form of ePub called MOIB which can be viewed on a Kindle and a Kindle Reader.

Amazon (evil) blocks ePub on the Kindle.

Pay attention as that is related to Apple's announcment this next week which I hope includes more about their support for ePub on the Mac which is already quite good for generating ePub. What Apple needs is a 'kick ***' viewer that handles ePub3 like iBooks. If they want a lock on the educational market they need to build one ASAP. It would be even beter if Apple builds one and makes it available on all platforms in all languages.

I confess I was not aware, RTFD was an Apple standard but even if that is so, it doesn't change the fact that iCoco, myself and obviousely some others do have problems getting the correct result by using one option of Mail.app, namely the save as... dialog that lets you choose to save an email in rich text format INCLUDING all the attachments that came with the email. (BTW the RTFD "files" I had saved earlier can be used under Windows XP with no problem. The RTFD is simply a folder there. What I learned now, is that I should not change any of those RTFD under Windows...

Anyway, when we try to use this save option on Mail.app, we receive an RTFD that does contail the txt-file alone but not the attachments. To me this clearly is a bug. I do not use Mail.app in any unusual way, I do not use any plugins or whatever with it. I use it in the same way as I had used it under SL. Only since I upgraded to Lion the bug appeared. It is true, though, that there are reports that the bug had appeared on previous versions of OS X as well. So, it might not be Lion specific at all.

What we would need to do is find out which "accompanying" setting (or whatever) it is that produces the bug on some systems, while others remain unbothered...

Same problem here. Up until around December 2012, I regularly Saved emails with 10 to 40 JPG attachments as RTF, and they always were perfect, and exactly where I wanted them.

Beginning in January, I began to see some files being saved without any attachments. RTF, but no JPGs.

Yesterday I stupidly saved dozens of files like this without looking at the file sizes, and was quite perturbed to find that only one had the attachments included. ALL of the JPG files were found however in the MAIL 'Mail Downloads' folder in the secret Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library path...

This morning I upgraded to 10.8.3, and LO and behold... the problem is STILL there...

I have repaired permissions, and burned the most precious incense, and this is getting to be a very bad problem.

I do hope that this thread hasn't migrated to some other topic and I'm missing it ??

thanks for all the careful problem reports

I can only add my frustration to that of all of you.

I have a brand new Mac that came with 10.8.2, which I updated to 10.8.3 last week and I cannot save in the RTFD format which is still available in TEXTEDIT. So what I did to save the pictures attached to a Mail message was to select them all, copy them to a TEXTEDIT new document where I was then able to save them in the RTFD format.

I was originally trying to save the message the good old 10.6.8 way but the "Save" window was telling me it would be saved in RTF and did not allow me (grayed out) to select "Include attachments".

I too hope someone from Apple will at least read these!

mulligans missus wrote:

No bug. Must be the way you are handling your system.

Unless you can tell us how to fix it, it is a bug.

And, it seems, the problem persists in mavericks: Most disappointing.

Yeah, and still here with Yosemite 10.10. This is poor. It is a great feature. It's no good people saying use other methods. The tick box "Include attachments" when saving to Rich Text is still there. It doesn't work. If Apple can't fix it (surely not the case), why the do they still offer it in the shiny new Yosemite? They've wasted millions on the new look and done nothing to fix this simple functionality issue.

<Edited by Host>

Wow iCoco - you've got stamina on this, despite Apple's best efforts to discourage you. This idiotic failure is the main reason I will never install post-Snow Leopard OS on my daily MacBook (aside from much other nonsense in later OS, particularly the death of Save As in Profile. The Mail bug slows down my productivity as a journalist daily receiving maybe 25 emails with attachments that need filing. I like to see that RTFD with the docs and pix in the corner and I want the file and contents for all formats and archive situations I may imagine. Sometimes I think Apple want to make sure we don't escape their closed world and have to use Mail in every situation, but then, why not remove the RTFD + attachments option from the Save As dropdown? It's plain just broken and Apple can't do the simplest job of fixing it. We witness the sad, slow death of a once great enterprise.

Replying to myself - I have posted elsewhere on this, following installation of 10.10.5 - 10.10.5: Why no fix for Mail's failure to save attachments in RTFD?

That's four years Apple have ignored their customers. Hopeless.

Finally I have found a solution to this!

I selected all and copied a long email, with images etc throughout, and then pasted into a new Apple Pages 5.0 document.

It worked! The document was an almost exact copy. ✅

I now only use GoogleDocs/GDrive and so I exported to a .doc file from Pages, and the uploaded to GDrive. GoogleDocs then happily converted from .doc to GoogleDocs and I am a very happy man! 🙂