Mac Mail: Inline Attachments

apple-mailattachmentsemailmac

Let's say a user sends me e-mail with an attached file: attachment.txt, which contains the text

This is the contents of attachment.txt!!!1one

In Thunderbird, I would see a little icon labeled "attachment.txt". However, in Mac Mail (v 3.6 935/935.3), the text file is in-lined, so the message looks like this:

On Jul 24, 2009, at 8:38 AM, John Doe
wrote:

Hi Pete, I've attached the file.

This is the contents of
attachment.txt!!!1one

This automatic inline attachment gets really annoying when a colleague sends me a 400 line C++ code & refers to line number n… I have to manually copy & paste the contents of the e-mail into a seperate file, then hope I got the spacing correct in order to jump down to line n. How do I use Mac mail to list/download individual attachments as an icon/separate file?

Best Answer

I always see the files as attachments. I just did a quick test with a simple text file and it is displayed as an attachment as expected. Perhaps it has to do with the way the file is attached by the sending mail client?

If you take a look at the raw source (Command-Option-U), you can see some details on how the attachment is included in the message. If the Content-Disposition says inline, it is correct for Mail to display the attachment in the message as you describe. If the Content-Disposition says attachment, it should appear as a separate file.

Here is what my test looked like.

    --Apple-Mail-5--439805500
    Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset=US-ASCII;
        format=flowed
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

    Hi Pete, I've attached the file.


    --Apple-Mail-5--439805500
    Content-Disposition: attachment;
        filename=attachment.txt
    Content-Type: text/plain;
        x-unix-mode=0644;
        name="attachment.txt"
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

    This is the contents of attachment.txt!!!1one
    --Apple-Mail-5--439805500
    Content-Type: text/plain;
        charset=US-ASCII;
        format=flowed
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit



    --Apple-Mail-5--439805500--
Related Question