Mail 11 (High Sierra): mail attachments "downloading" but never actually download

Hi, I installed 10.13.4 and I have Mail app version 11.3. I opened Mail app, preferences, rules and disabled "news from apple". After that it has all worked perfectly. I used to get a grey Safari logo appear when I opened an attachment and that has gone now. Don't really know what fixed it all, but to say I am VERY pleased.

Hi I have the downloading issue and my optimise isn't on for Mail

and I still have this problem,

I have 'rebuilt' the mailbox, and on one occasion it seemed to

work better downloading (and sending) attachments

but it isn't working again

... I wish never to ""upgrade"" again

You are correct and thank you for your direction on this. I found that the attachments did not download when I use rules to redirect gmails to specific mailboxes. However, I also have gmail set up to archive all mail so I am able to see the complete attachment in the archive folder, which also appears when setting up a gmail account in Mail. I believe the change has been made by GoogleMail. A pain in the butt for those dependent on using rules to manage email.

I am having this problem and I was able to determine that it started when I installed the OSX 10.13.3 supplemental update on 3/10/18. I have been able to stop it by turning off my mail rules that move the emails with attachments to a local folder. For now I am doing this manually, but it is a pain, because I receive many of these on a daily basis that clog up my inbox. I hope Apple will come up with a fix for this very soon.

I don't use gmail and I am having this issue with mail in my main mailbox. No sub boxes. I do have some rules set up, but not affecting the messages in question.

Interesting that someone posted that they could go to their iPhone and resend the message to themselves and it would come through ok.

As a similar workaround, I was able to download and open the attachments in the original email on the iPad, and then I airdropped them to the Mac.

....

Interesting. After I told the iPad to download the attachments, Mail on the laptop was suddenly able to open the attachments, too.

I'm having this problem also but I'm not understanding the rules solution. It happens on most attachments and when I restart Mail, I am able to open them again but after a while (sometimes less than 10-15 minutes) they go back to perma-loading status. I only have a handful of rules and they are to pull messages out of the inbox so the messages I am seeing have not been moved. Is the issue just that they are being run through a filter at all? Does this apply to all rules or only rules that were created prior to the update? If it applies to all rules, does this mean the only solution is to use no rules ever?

Isn't it disheartening that, 6 months later, Apple has not bothered to fix this issue. I installed High Sierra 3 days ago, and I am not able to download any attachment whatsoever. File/Save Attachment does not work. I will not be installing any updates form Apple whether on my iPhone, iPad or iMacs in the future - that is what I have been hearing as well; not just my conclusion.

It is, indeed, very disappointing - and it all adds to the evidence that Apple has forgotten that the software it supplies with its kit is just as important in moulding the experience as the hardware. Its hardware quality remain amazingly high, its product support is second to none in the industry, yet the importance of software quality has been completely left behind.

The other thing that strikes me about the particular problem under discussion is the apparent randomness of where it strikes. For me it made Apple Mail completely unusable (well, if I'm honest it was the last straw in a whole successions of problems with mail, but a mail app that won't download attachments remains about as much use as a chocolate fireguard), and I have now completely given up on Apple Mail and adopted another solution (AirMai) even though it won't do a half of what Apple Mail used to do! On the other and, my wife has been using Apple Mail as long as I had, and is at least as heavy a user of email as myself, but she has never had any problems downloading attachments, and so she remains with Apple Mail!

Indeed, it has occurred to me to wonder how much of the problem (either this one, or the many other ones I have experienced) is with Apple Mail itself, and how much might be due to the way most long-standing users update their OS. My wife started her life with a Mac using a MacBook Air 15" running, TTBOMR, Mountain Lion, and never upgraded the OS major release until very recently, when she acquired a new MacBook 12". At that point we simply migrated her old machine to the new one, which had MacOS 10.13.4 already on it.

On the other hand, I started with Lion, and installed every major OS upgraded from Mountain Lion to High Sierra, and had major Mail problems pretty much every upgrade, and eventually found myself with a barely-functioning Mail application, from which all intelligence had been stripped out on the way. (For example, it never used to be necessary to think of my rule set when amending mailbox names, or the position of a mailbox in the hierarchy - I could rename boxes, or drag them around within the hierarchy, and the rules were automagically amended to keep up. Then one day I discovered that it no longer worked, that a mailbox whose name or position changed was instantly lost to Mail rules! beca8se the rules were NOT amended to keep up!

I will be one helluva pain to do, but I'm seriously thinking of setting up Apple Mail from scratch, to see if the problems I've had for years remain ...

I have typically have just upgraded my Macs with each new OS, and I have not experienced a lot or mail problems before this one. The only other issue I have had is with unreliable search results, not finding emails that I know are there and a search should have located. This issue has been ongoing for several years.

However, because of some other wanky issues I was having, I think due to trying to run Windows with Parallels, I decided to do a clean OS install with High Sierra, and migrate my data over manually. Everything was fine initially, but this problem started showing up after I did the 10.13.3 incremental upgrades in early February.

I have to agree with several other posters that this is a major issue and one that Apple should fix sooner rather than later.

I just updated to Mac OSX 10.13.5 and, not only does the problem persist on emails that have been moved using rules, it is now happening to attachments to mail in my inbox that have had no rules applied. So, the problems seems to have gotten worse with this last "upgrade". I was hoping for a fix, but instead, we got more things broken.

"

You have for a while and it depends upon these settings for the file to download .

You can click on apple logo > About this Mac > Manage > click on mail on the left side bar if you see this option dont automatically download attachments .

"

What are you talking about? Where is "apple logo > About this Mac > Manage >"? Manage does not appear in About this Mac, perhaps someplace else?

It's actually "apple logo > About this Mac > Storage > Manage >", but that does not solve my problem. I use only a few rules (colorcoding of important emails) and I have huge problems with attachments that does not download. I now use Thunderbird to download important attachments without any hassle.

So it seems that applying rules to messages before their attachments have been downloaded makes the attachments permanently unavailable. One solution is disabling automatic application of rules on incoming messages and applying them manually after all downloads have been finished. It's sad that this bug still has not been corrected in Mail.

I wonder now if it would be possible to add an action into those rules with an AppleScript that either waits for all downloads to finish (if that is possible at all) or – at least – to delay for a constant time so downloads should have been finished. This of course has the potential danger of destroying an unusually longsome download.

Any ideas?

I think you are on the right track as when comparing the RAW email data with the file which was copied by RULES the copied file was truncated. This makes me also believe that the file was not fully downloaded when being copied. If I copy the good, completed downloaded attached file manually, it copies correctly.

Hi,

It's because they are actually downloading (even if your Internet connection isn't presently accessible...).

This is a problem usually created by the IMAP protocol itself: it allows to download only partially the attachments. So you can have on your local email client some (many) attachments partially downloaded (the original motive of this very, very bad idea was to save some bandwith, in the good old times where the Internet was a tad slow).

Try to (take a while...) let time to your email client, connected to the Internet, to download all your attachments. NB: don't do that at hours when all the country tries to do so... otherwise the mail server will inevitably try to "help" you gain some time/bandwith by NOT downloading to your mail client the larger attachments...

Normally, never such problems with POP3. Emails are entirely downloaded one by one, including their attachments. This is slower, this takes room on your local disk, but it's way safer.

Post Scriptum: Somebody explains why (why, why?) all your email provider access are by IMAP, up-there? LOL

Regards.