mail.app message has wrong attachment

+1 I have had the same issue twice..

I think it happens when an attachment already exists in your Mail Downloads folder with the same name. Double clicking on the attachment seems to open the old one and not the one in the email.

Save Attachments is a work-around, but still very very annoying bug.

It also happened to me - with calendar invitations!

It took me a whole day to find out why I can't add an event from Mail.

Double-clicking in Mail added wrong event to wrong calendar. Luckily I was careful enough to check.

Then everything from iCloud to Mac Calendars to OSX upgrade was under suspicion.

Finally when clicking the attacched invitation file from Finder it started to work.

This is really huge bug !!!

Same problem with MountainLion and latest AppleMail. Has anyone found a fix? Does rebuilding the mail database help? How about deleting the account and then re-adding it? The account that has the issue is an IMAP Google Apps Premier account. Works fine on iPhone, iPad2, PCs, other Macs, but is a problem on my iMac. Seems to be caching an attachment and then opening it vs. the correct one?

Pretty serious problem which renders mail on this iMac useless as we use a lot of attachments...

I can confirm this with Acrobat Pro 10.1.3 and started happening after the recent software update . So this is Adobe's problem I would think.

I just ran into this issue today as well. Here is what I discoverred:

- If I double-click on the pdf attachment of a sent email, I was seeing something totally different from what was actually sent (using Adobe Acrobat).

- If I do a quick look on the attachment, it is what was sent.

I opened the attachment with Acrobat Reader (10.1.3) and Preview. I then right-clicked on the icon in the toolbar of both windows to see the path to the attachment. The paths were different:

Acrobat: ~/Library/Mail Downloads/<file>.pdf

Preview: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads/<file>.pdf

So, it appears that Mountain Lion has moved mail attachments to a new folder from where they were before (~/Library/Mail Downloads). I am now suspecting the following:

1- Old email attachments are left in the old location.

2- If there is a newer attachment in the new location with the same name as one in the old location, Adobe Acrobat gets confused and is opening the old attachment.

To verify this, I renamed the attachment in the old location and tried to open it from the email with Acrobat again. This time, Acrobat opened the correct attachment!!

Hopefully Adobe fixes this soon!!

This isn't an Acrobat issue, per say, I've been able to duplicate this with Excel and Word as well. I also discovered that attachments don't actually get saved into any folder until you try and open them or use quick view from within the email.

Here's the short version...

I think this is an Apple issue.

To correct this I think it would be safe to delete the attachments in the old location as long as you had the original email because they are re-created from the original email if they don't already exist in the new location.

Here's the long version. This is what I found...

- if you quick view or open an attachment and it doesn't already exist in the new location it will copy it from the email into there and open it from that location

- the first time I double-click the file it opens from the new location...subsequent double-clicks opens the file from the old location

- the first time I quick view the file it shows as the correct version and if I close quick view and double-click the file it opens it from the new location, but subsequent double-clicks will open it from the old location

- if you find an older email with an attachment that exists in the old location and open that file it copies it to the new location and if one already exists there it appends a version like <filename>-1.doc

- every time you open an attachment that has the same name as one that already exists in the new location it appends a version number unless the file is the same size (or using some other comparative operator). So, if you open a new attachment with the name "my_file.doc" and it's a modified version of a previous attachment it will create a new file in the new location my_file.doc. If you then open the old attachment it will create a file in the new location called my_file-1.doc. And every time you open that old attachment it will create a new file so the next one will be my_file-2.doc etc.

This is very strange behaviour indeed. I would say that after the first time it saves an attachment and opens the file correctly, it is then checking the old location for that attachment name and if it exists it will open that version.

I have had a New MacBook Air with Mountain Lion for a week and have twice encountered this issue in Mail with Word douments attached. In the latest, I received an email with an attachment named Notice of AGM. I opened it with a double click and it opened a 2009 Word file with the same name. I accused the sender of having made a mistake, which of course they had not. When I investigated a bit further I found that if I used Quick Look the correct attachment opened. If I dragged the file to the desktop and opened it it opened the correct document.

This has severely shaken my confidence in Mountain Lion and Mail and I will probably be looking for an alternative email client until this serious bug is reliably fixed.

I just discovered this problem as well (OSX 10.8.2) and Mail 6.2.1499. Are there any fix to the problem?

I have the same problem with Mail 6.2. (1499) under 10.8.2 (both in German) and realised it with attached MS Word files from different persons. I often receive files with the same name (CV.doc) and it is really a pain in the... to open the wrong ones.

Thanks cpmax!

Hopefully APPLE - are you listening? - will stop this bug!

I had been living with the work-around of copying calendar invites to the desktop before opening them.

After reading this thread, I deleted both the folders below and restarted Mail. Now calendar invites in mail messages work properly again.

Mail's View preferences had to be reset, but nothing else seems to be affected. Problem solved.

~/Library/Mail Downloads/

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/

I have been experiencing this as well with file attachments of the same name. The easiest solution is to "Save As". I hope Apple fixes this bug soon!

This bug is almost 2 years old -- has anyone reported it at bug.apple.com?

My boss just had this problem with 2 different emails with attached excel spreadsheets a couple of weeks apart. He has a new macbook pro running Mountain Lion, with his email brought over from his 10.6.8 laptop. The first time the file was named "MeetingAgenda.xls" and double-clicking on the attachment got last year's agenda, while saving the file on the desktop got this one. This week it was "5YearPlan.xls" which got last year's plan by double-clicking the attachment. People reusing old files and updating content details is pretty common, and this is a killer... (There is a famous story about the British government reusing an old MS Word document for a press release, which they emailed to the press. All of the old content in the history of the file was embedded in it, including some highly classified stuff.)

I've just started having this issue at work. I'm now sending out multiple payslip attachments that are generated by accounting software, Xero, and also statements sent as attachments from another software application. The file names are often the same. Clients and staff are receiving different pdf attachments than are being sent by me. It's really annoying and causing confusion for all concerned.

This happens to me as well. BUT...this only happens when the message preview pane is on either the bottom of the emails or the side. This happens for any attachments, pdfs, word, excel...anything.

If you double click an email thus opening it in a new window, the attachments contained in the email are as they should be and not OLD attachments.

I solved this issue by setting the Viewing (preferences>viewing) to Classic Layout. Its cumbersome but this is the only way. Apple please fix this.