Remove Email Attachments In Outlook Without Deleting the Message
Someone sent this email message that contained two very large attachments - they were video files and each weighed in excess of 6 MB.
While there’s enough free space on the hard drive, such big email attachments do inflate the size of Outlook PST files thus slowing down the backup process.
Luckily, there’s a very easy solution - you can save the attachment(s) on to your hard drive and then delete them from the main email message. Here’s how:
Step 1. Right click the email attachment that you want to get rid of and choose "Save As".
If there are two or more attachments in the messages, go to File -> Save Attachments -> Save All Attachments to create a copy on the hard drive in one go.
Step 2. Right click again and select the "Remove" option this time.
The bulky file is deleted from Outlook but your email message stays intact.
Related: Backup Your Outlook PST to Gmail
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This doesn’t work. The “REMOVE” remains greyed out.
Is there a way to do this with IMAP?
This is Awesome, but does it work with a selection of Several messages?
This would be great if it did work. I stay grayed, I user outlook 2003.
I use Outlook 2002 and the “Remove” is not active in my menu. Why? Any help / advise?
Pratheep
It doesn’t work even after saving the attachment. The Remove remain grayed out.
This doesn’t work. “Remove” option is hidden. Can u take a look?
@Holocron: Make sure you double-click to open the message first. Don’t just do it from the reading pane
Still better than that… Get a Gmail address and forward big files like this one to it (you can do it as a rule), then get Gmail to reply to this email automatically without the attachment…
The Remove button remains grey if you see the mail on the Outlook main window. But if you open a message separately in its own window, it works. At least in my Outlook 2007.
They key to making this work is to open the message, not just read it in the viewing pane.
Have you tried selecting the attachments and pressing delete?
Wouldn’t it be so much better if Microsoft had a ’save and remove attachments’ option - this process could be excecuted in far less mouse clicks, especially when you have multiple attachments on an email! Great tip though - thanks.