When you say “click on QuickLook”, do you mean select the attachment and press the space bar? I ask because that is how I routinely look at attachments in Mail, and I saw an attachment that arrived today in my Mail Downloads folder (and I definitely had not opened the attachment other than by QuickLook).
To make it clear what I did, follow the screen-shot snips below. At top is an incoming mail with an attachment with a small icon at the upper right showing it has an attachment. I the second screen shot I left-clicked that icon and got a bar between the addresses and “siri found a contact” showing the single attachment. In the third, I show what I got from that click: a choice of three options, one to save all, one the newsletter itself, and one “Quick Look”. I have never found anything I quick looked if I didn’t try to save it. If I tried to save the attachment, the Mac offers me the option of storing it in what I assume is the last open folder used to store something in from Mail.
However, when I go through this exercise and accidentally opened in a way I expected it to be saved, I find it hiding in my user Library/Container/Mail/Data/Data/Data/Data/Library/MailDownloads although I may have added an extra data or two in. In any case, it’s pretty deep and hard to find. What Apple is trying to do is a mystery, but it appears to being filling up memory with stuff that never gets removed. Is this where Crufft comes from?
I have run out of time to spend on this project and must get to work
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Thank you for spending the time you have devoted to this.
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Thanks for the help and the description of Quick Look, I’ve hardly used that.
One of the things I do frequently is use Quickbooks to send myself reports from my clients. I usually open the file in Preview, print the report and delete the email. But I didn’t realize they were just piling up on the hard drive until I searched or something yesterday and found them all. I think I had 8GB in that folder, thousands of files.
Diane
Not a separate place. They remain MIME encoded in the message itself.
It is not true that they remain on the server, as speculated here.
Signatures are likewise embedded in the message.
I have yet to check for redundant/unwanted mail attachments on my Macs but I will mention that the Mail Steward app that I use for archiving emails (into a mySQL database) has the option to include attachments. I archive to an external drive so that is one way to make more space on my Macs.