[quote user="Joerg"]

Oh yes, life could be so easy without those weak links  :-)

Unfortunately judgment is always required. We are receiving so many different mails from different senders with more or less attachments. And those attachment have to be saved to different network locations at different servers. Therefore I would have to create too many filter rules.

Presently there is a verbal policy in force where the users are requested to remove attachments from emails directly after saving them on the server. This avoids an inflating of our mailbox drive. But in practice often they forget it or they are lazy, and at the end of the year I have to "clean" all user mail accounts by searching for the "big pieces" of attachments which are aready saved at the server but not removed from the mail account.

The best way for me would be a solution where the users are being automatically asked for an attachment deletion after they have saved an attachment.  ...  I know, it's a dream. ;-)

Hi Joerg!

I think you could try using one of those hot key managers like AutoHotKey, AutoIt3, TinyTask, WinParrot, and so to automate the process. The not so good part of the story is that you may turn your weak links yet weaker. Anyway, using a tool like AutoHotKey or AutoIt will let you control the working environment checking which window, child window, class, etc is active. TinyTask and WinParrot are just "dumb" macro executors, requiring more attention of end user.

 Within Pegasus Mail you could also try Quick Actions. One of the Quick Actions options is "Apply a set of filtering rules to the message". As long as the message is in NewMail folder (as .CNM) it could save and delete attachments. As an example, you could trigger rule by entire file name, only the name, and only the extension.

Hi,

We often receive e-mails with a lot of attachments. The saving/extracting of the attachments all at once is no problem (as long as the mail is situated in the New Mail Folder). But after that we would like to remove the attachments. And here I have to mark and delete every single attachment one after another. This is annoying me.

Is there an opportunity to mark all attachments and delete them at once?

Greetings

Joerg

Hi!

Let's make things straight: you can only delete message sections while it is on .cnm file form (e.g. NewMail or external mailboxes). Other than that you can't delete attachments or any other message section.

If you select more than one section and press delete button only first selected item will be deleted. This is by design but may change in future versions (maybe a Beta Tester can add some comments here). The only way to delete more than one item at once while using the message reader is when they are bundled together (see below).

Unfortunately, this construction is under Sender's domain/control, not Reader's. The other approach would be through rules based on attachment filenames but my attempts on this particular matter never gave me much joy. Maybe I'll revisit sometime in future.

Thanks a lot for your reply, Euler. We are using Pmail in connection with Mercury for a while and we are aware about this. But I thought maybe there are any new unknown functions in the latest Pmail version which make some things easier, like deleting of multiple attachments at once. But you are right, most probably this is not desired by the developer.

So it seems I have to keep my procedure: Switching-off the delete confirmation in Settings / Choosing the 1st attachment / Pressing Delete button / Choosing the 2nd attachment / Pressing Delete button / Choosing the 3rd attachment / Pressing Delete button / .... and finally re-activate the Delete Confirmation in Pmail Settings. Without the deactivation of the delete confirmation I have to confirm every removal step additionally. With 20 attachments you get 20 clicks more    :-))

Greetings to Brazil

Joerg

IIRC Mercury has a "Delete Attachment" filter action (maybe Pmail too?).

Maybe a "clean me" address with attached rule set you could forward the messages to after saving the attachments..

I have a (mercury) policy setup that archives attachments from all mail on the way through (but I don't delete them).

Possibly combining such with a Delete Attachment filter (on specified addresses) could be a more automated solution.

It's been a few years since I set it up, but could dredge up the details if you want.

It even md5sums them to avoid duplicates :)

Hi dilberts,

Sounds good but unfortunately I do not search a solution for me alone. I maintain a Mercury/Pmail system with 10 users and I do not know whether they would observe a new policy where they have to send all e-mails to another address where the delete filter is working. When this is done the filter account has to return the emails to the right user again. That means the filter has to handle different users and the users would receive some e-mails twice, the original and another copy where the attachments are removed. This would be too much for my users.  ;-)

But thanks a lot for the hint.

Joerg

Yeah, users are generally the weak link in any brilliant plan :D

 Are the mails in question identifiable by machine?

Or is judgement required as to which get "the treatment"?

Would it work if all attachments were stripped prior to delivery and saved to their home dir or a network location or such?

My script currently just dumps them into a dir like "save\date\time_sender_message-id" (for uniqueness)

This could be easily changed to anywhere accessible by Mercury, with variables set from any parseable info from the messages.

Oh yes, life could be so easy without those weak links  :-)

Unfortunately judgment is always required. We are receiving so many different mails from different senders with more or less attachments. And those attachment have to be saved to different network locations at different servers. Therefore I would have to create too many filter rules.

Presently there is a verbal policy in force where the users are requested to remove attachments from emails directly after saving them on the server. This avoids an inflating of our mailbox drive. But in practice often they forget it or they are lazy, and at the end of the year I have to "clean" all user mail accounts by searching for the "big pieces" of attachments which are aready saved at the server but not removed from the mail account.

The best way for me would be a solution where the users are being automatically asked for an attachment deletion after they have saved an attachment.  ...  I know, it's a dream. ;-)

Greetings

Joerg

When I started looking at it, I had similar goals, and visions of saving the files and replacing the attachments with a link.

It's probably do-able, but has a lot of issues to cope with, so I stopped once my simple archiving task was working.