Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
It turns out it's not all that easy to remove attachments from received email in Outlook Express. In fact, it apparently requires a bit of a hack.
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After recieving a message, the person asking the question saves the attachment to disk and then wants to be able to remove the attachment from the email, saving only the text.
I thought this one would be easy. In Outlook you can open up the received message, right click on the attachment, and select remove.
No such luck in Outlook Express. In fact, as far as I can tell it can't be done within Outlook Express.
However I did stumble into this hack for manually removing attachments. I'll warn you that it is a hack; it involves using a text editor to remove the attachment portion of the message from its raw form. Relatively straightforward, but not something I'd want to do.
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Article C1976 - June 2, 2004
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
We, too, are suddenly experiencing the ghost attachments. One morning the computer showed attachments on emails to which nothing was actually attached. Knowing the senders, we confirmed that they had not sent attachments. Yet, OE reflects the paper clip beside the emails as if there are attachments.
We have a legal copy of Windows XP which came with the computer purchased direct from the manufacturer (Dell). We updated SP2 quite some time ago, as well.
Our biggest fear is that this is some type of virus attaching itself and will be sent were we to forward the emails with the ghost attachment. Otherwise, it will be a grand nuisance, but not knowing whether or not there is an attachment is not the worst obstacle faced daily. :^)
Thanks for any insight...
Posted by: PT at December 18, 2007 8:10 PMThe problem of ghost attachments (paper clip icons on e-mails who do not have an attachment) can be caused by a bug in the virus scanner AVG. If you have this program, go into the e-mail scanner settings and uncheck the box "Certify e-mail." Your incoming and outgoing e-mails will continue to be scanned, just not given an AVG certification which is pretty much irrelevant. This will fix the problem.
Posted by: Nathan F at December 31, 2007 1:21 AMLeo. I ended up here when I was trying to find out how to forward an e-mail I'd already sent outside to my internal cohorts WITHOUT attachments using outlook express. The help for OUTLOOK EXPRESS was worthless, but the answer is simple and maybe someone else can benefit; it took me 10 minutes to try the obvious.
Chose FORWARD, add your message to the forwarding addressees, SELECT each attachment and press DEL, then SEND. DUH
Ralph
PS: Of course, large companies use industrial strength e-mail systems which always have "Send without attachments" as the DEFAULT, but I'm semiretired and working mostly from home; my cohorts needed to know what I told clients, but didn't need the attachments.
Posted by: Ralph G at January 10, 2008 1:17 PMThe hack to remove attachments is fine, and easy to use. But as the reason for wanting to remove an attachment is that it is large, using notepad or wordpad takes forever.
Posted by: Stewart at March 1, 2008 6:53 AMInstead use Word, keeping the file in txt format.
Very quick and works a dream.
dear sir
Posted by: Sushil Kumar at April 11, 2008 9:16 AMi have typical problem in outlook express my outlook express show all attechment from senders but only one sender send me word or excel attechment don't download in my outlook express but this attechment show in my web mail i don't understand how do i if u have any solution give me please