How in the Tech

Intelligently Prune Attachments from Outlook

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 6, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Outlook

As storage prices continue to plummet we are still constrained by things as silly as email quotas. It is almost a taboo topic as no one will admit that clinging to such an out-dated ideology is asinine. Most workplaces enforce a quota on your Inbox and consequently, most of us have received the quota warning message when we catastrophically approach the 100% mark. The routine is simple enough; within Outlook we sort our email headers by size and robotically progress through each email – either deleting the attachment or the entire email in question. I generally look for attachment emails because, logically, they are the most bang for the buck when addressed as it relates to quotas. Everyone tends to accept this process, but what do you do if the email or attachment are important? Generally, you either skip that email and look for an easier target, or you save the attachment locally and decouple it from the corresponding email. Hopefully you remember where that attachment went 6 months from now right?

I’ve got a better solution for you, the Outlook Attachment Remover. This free Outlook add-in facilitates the saving of attachments but uniquely replaces the attachment in the email with a shortcut to it’s local location. This is actually the best of both worlds in that we still have a historical record in our email and easy access to the associated attachment, but our Outlook Admin Overlords are content with our Inbox size.

Using filters the add-in is also able to strip attachments over a certain size, or of certain file types.

Outlook Attachment Remover works in Outlook 2007 under Vista; unfortunately the website does not provide details on older versions but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with Outlook 2003. Give it a try and let me know in the comments!