Remove Email Attachments In Outlook Without Deleting the Message

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.

What if you accidently hit remove and you did not mean to? Where does the file go?!?!?!

In case you delete an attachment by mistake, I think pressing the ESC key would help.

Microsoft Outlook will ask you if you like to save the changes .. just say No.

There is an interesting question that seem to go unanswered. Let’s forget about the ESC key and not clicking on the Save button. Where does the removed file end up? Where does it go if you’ve saved the email? Where can the file be found if you made a mistake and removed it, saved the email and closed out of Outlook? Can this file be retrieved?

First, I would like to express my surprise that so many people do not know about something simple like this; and why this merits its own separate blog entry.

Second, why this obvious bug of “Remove” not being active unless message is opened and not just viewed in the Viewing Pane.

Third - and this is especially for Maddy - just such an option as you describe is available in Thunderbird, the email client from Mozilla. Right-click on the attachment and select “Detach…” This opens a Save dialog to save the attachment and then, removes it from the message.

One tip and one question -

Depending on the format of the email, I find in addition to opening the email, I sometimes also have to select “Edit Message” before I can use the Remove command. I also use this to delete imbedded tables or pictures that I don’t need. In Outlook 2003, Edit Message used to be on the menu when I right clicked in the body of the message, but I found in Outlook 2007, I had to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

Question - I can’t seem to remove attachments from a Meeting Request. They show up as icons in the body of the message, but there is no Remove or Cut option and highlighting and hitting Delete does not work. I would try to select “Edit Message”, but I can’t seem to find that command for a meeting request in Outlook 2007. Any ideas?

Thank you M Smotrilla for the most helpful tip. I think many users had the same problem as I did in not being able to delete an attachment even when the sent message was opened in its own window. Just clicked “other actions”/”edit message,” and the “cut” button was no longer hidden.

Just a bit of warning - the recommendation only works in emails that were sent in the HTML format, not Rich Text or Plain Text.

The Remove option is greyed out in both of these options.

This was the most frustrating thing in the world when I got Office 2007. Solution:
1- Open the email in its own window
2- Go to Actions box - Other Actions - Edit Message
3- Now you can delete the attachments and save the email w/o deleting the entire email