Removing Attachments from Mail in Sierra

I resolved this problem by quiting Mail. I could use the remove attachments command after Mail was launched again. I hope this works for you too. Good luck.

As per this article Mail for Mac: View attachments in Mail

Delete attachments

Choose Message > Remove Attachments. The message remains in the mailbox, and is annotated to indicate that all attachments were manually removed. For IMAP accounts, attachments are also deleted from the mail server, and can’t be retrieved.

By default, when you delete a message with an attachment, the attachment is deleted too. To change this setting, choose Mail > Preferences, click General, click the “Remove unedited downloads” pop-up menu, then choose an option. Mail doesn’t delete attachments that you have saved.

I'm 100% with you. The way you summarized this shameful issue was the best description I've found so far.

Maybe we have to consider a donation to Apple to start thinking seriously about Mail X or Mail macOS...

Editing with TexEdit the .emlx file in the directory /Users/Username/Library/Mail/V4/Mailboxes

seems to be the only way to remove attachments from any email so far.

Just be aware that in doing this you need to know what you are doing

it's not for beginners or you could end up ruining everything: do a backup and experiment it first on one email you don't care, like have someone send you an email with a small attachment.

Open the email, delete just the attachment below your message, save it, close Mail, re-launch Mail, and the attachment has gone.

I discovered that finding the .emlx file it's easier than it seems:

1) Quit Mail and open the folder V4 in /Users/Username/Library/Mail/V4/

2) write in the search field the Subject of the email you are looking for:

magically the email appears with the name of the sender or the senders if you have more than one email

with the same words. Choose the one you were looking for

3) drag the email on TexEdit

4) find the attachment : it will look like garbled text- something like

/9j/4UcWRXhpZgAATU0AKgAAAAgACwEPAAIAAAAGAAAAkgEQAAIAAAAPAAAA

mAESAAMAAAABAAEAmAESAAMAAAABAAEAmAESAAMAAAABAAEA

It will be very long, depending how big is the attachment

5) Select it all but stop before you get to something similar to

--Apple-Mail-CA458EBA-4B87-4995-8B30-3FC1A217

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset=us-ascii

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

5) delete your selection and restart Mail

Your email is clean of any attachment.

Mine is grey'ed out like everyone else so "remove attachments" is not an option.

Hi,

I don't know the solution, but a workaround would be to use the new optimize storage utility: Free up storage space on your Mac - Apple Support

I had this problem a few OS versions ago. Never found a solution, only workarounds. Sad to see it's back.

For me, the "Remove attachments" option is not greyed out, it's selectable but nothing happens.

I'm starting to build up quite a number of email messages with attachments to them, normally I save them and then remove them to keep the Mail database slim.

Correction: I'm perfectly able to remove small attachments, but if they're larger than … say … 5 MB, the command won't bite.

Considering how long it took for Apple to fix this last time, I guess I'm stuck with my attachments 'til 2020 or so.

This is quite annoying, there seem to be some major limitations to the way this command works currently. You can select messages individually and the attachments will remove quite easily, but select a group and it either fails or goes very, very slow. In order to reduce the chances of a failure, I do a few things:

Create a smart mailbox and change to Classic View so I can sort by message size. Smart Mailbox is created with:

Message is in mailbox - (chosen mailbox)

Contains attachments

I found that Mail.app was pulling in messages with previously removed attachments. It was not updating the size of these message to the new size (I sort by size and start with the biggest messages) even though all that remained was a txt file with a note about the attachment removal, these messages were still 5 or 6mb or whatever they originally were. These messages will grey out the 'Remove Attachments' menu option, so will cause the process to fail and need to be filtered out.

Entire message - does not contain - "has been manually removed"

Entire message - does not contain - Mail Attachment.txt

Then I turn off 'Organize by Conversation'.

Now select all the messages you want to remove attachments from and go and do something else for quite a while. Its very, very slow, but with the above filtered out, does seem to be mostly successful.

Note, there is no progress shown in the Activity window. Apple, at least you could add some feedback there to show whats actually happening in the background.

One more issue, if an email has an attachment which is another email, you need to filter these out too, as for whatever reason these will grey out the option and cause a batch process to fail, so add this to the Smart Mailbox rules:

Entire message - does not contain - .eml

It should work normally (takes a few seconds sometimes) in Sierra. Maybe you can do following:

-- Really Quit Mail, from the menu, then restart it, and try Mail.

-- Still the same? restart the mac in the safe mode, when logged in, do nothing, but restart the mac normally.

Please see my messages above. As explained, some emails will cause the process to fail. This appears to the be the main issue.

I hope I did not make a mistake: I made a recommendation to the OP.