Get Mail to display and send attachments in exactly the way you want

What You'll Need:

>> OS X 10.5 or later
>> Attachment Tamer
>> 5 Minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Everybody knows that Apple tries to make its software user-friendly, easy to use and helpful. However, the computer world – particularly the internet – is a complicated place. And sometimes, in an effort to be helpful or to keep things simple, Apple makes decisions on your behalf that don’t always work out the way you want them to.

A case in point: the way Mail handles email attachments. Mail tries to be friendly and helpful, but sometimes what it does is neither friendly nor helpful. Got a message with a PDF attached to it? Then Mail will try to show you what that PDF looks like, no matter how big it is. You can play back video and audio files in Mail, but what if you just want to save them? Got an attachment with a long filename? Then Mail will abridge that name so it doesn’t take up too much space in the message window, even if the only way you can tell files apart is through the bit that’s been abridged in their very long names.

The Size of it

Mail can sometimes take text and HTML attachments, or email messages attached to emails, and helpfully include them in the main message. But it will no longer display them as attachments, which makes saving and printing them harder.

Things get worse with images. If you want to simply attach an image to a message Mail won’t let you. Instead, it embeds it in the message because it thinks you want people to see it that way. If you resize the image to make it smaller, that’s how big it’ll make the next image you send as well. Images resized with Mail also lose information during resizing. If you just want to send the raw image file, Mail isn’t going to make it easy. And if you want to both embed and attach images to a message, well, forget it.

Attachment Tamer lets you alter how Mail displays attachments, such as images.

The flip side of this is that Mail can be very helpful and offer features other mail clients don’t offer. You can embed an attachment more or less anywhere in a rich text message using Mail. When someone else with Mail gets it, that’s where the attachment will appear. But is that how the message will appear in Outlook? No. It’s going to look different and Mail doesn’t offer a way to make the message look better to other clients.

Fortunately, Lokiware has developed a plug-in for Mail that fixes all these problems and more. It costs $14.99, although you can run it for free indefinitely, and it’s simple to install and use. Just download the program from http://lokiware.info/download/Attachment-Tamer-latest.dmg and run the simple installer. When you next launch Mail, you’ll be given a list of preferences, also available in Mail’s preferences, that will enable you to specify exactly how Mail handles attachments with both incoming and outgoing messages.

Largely, you can accept the default settings and everything will work, but on the next page, we’ll show you how to configure Attachment Tamer so that Mail displays attachments the way you want and embeds attachments the way you want. We’ll also show you how to make Mail play nicely with Microsoft’s Outlook and Exchange email servers, where the risk of your attachment becoming a ATT0001 file is ever-present.

Viewing Preferences

The Attachment Tamer preferences pane will open with the Viewing tab. By default, most of the settings will be good to go, but you can still tweak them.

The top of the pane relates to which kinds of attachments will be shown as icons and which attachments will be shown inline. Clicking Text and HTML files will ensure that these kinds of attachments will always show up as attachments, rather than be displayed in the message; the same is true if you click Attached email messages of email messages that have been attached to incoming messages. Clicking Audio files or Video files will ensure these kinds of files will never display as media players in email messages, but will always be displayed as attachments instead.

With PDFs and images, you have more options. Here, you can specify minimum file sizes. By default, any PDF or image will appear as an attachment, provided you’ve ticked the corresponding box. But if you enter a value greater than 0 into either of the matching boxes, Mail will try to display images and one-page PDFs in the message, providing they’re not bigger than the file size you entered – this means small images, for example, will display in the message, but images could be too large or time-consuming to display will appear as attachments.

Exceptions

Although you may want regular emails to display attached images as icons, with an HTML email such as a newsletter, you’ll probably want to see those images. But if you always want images to be shown as attachments rather than icons, clicking on Images in HTML layouts of incoming messages will mean images attached to all emails won’t be displayed.

You might also get emails from specific senders where you do want attachments to be displayed in a message. For example, if you get voicemails sent to you by email, you’ll probably want to listen to those voicemails straight away. If you enter email addresses separated by commas into the Exceptions box, any emails from those addresses will display the attachments “in place”. If the emails come from a single domain but have different addresses (for example, "voicemail1@maclife.com", "voicemail2@maclife.com", and so on), you can enter that domain (“@maclife.com”) into the Exceptions box instead.

Lastly, email messages usually contain information about how to display email attachments. Mail usually ignores this, but with the box Otherwise try to display attachments as they were sent checked, it will respect the information and display files as the sender intended – unless that conflicts with any of your previous settings.

Composing and Sending

Attachments in outgoing messages can be set to appear in messages or attached to them.

The Composing and Sending tab lets you choose the way you can send attachments. The Insert attachments menu shows how attachments can be added. According to viewing options means whatever options you set for displaying emails is how you’d like attachments to be included in messages. In place (if possible) ensures in-line attachments, such as images and text files, are embedded, and As icons means that files will be attached to emails.

Images that you want to send via email can be set to specific sizes or never resized, automatically.

The Downsize images to menu specifies the size that Mail will resize images to when you attach them to emails. Actual size is the default and ensures images aren’t resized, but there are other standard sizes, as well as Last size used, which is Mail’s default.

Compatibility

Attachment Tamer can make email messages display better in programs such as Outlook.

By clicking on Send messages in a compatible format, you can ensure that Microsoft Outlook and other email clients show any email you send as close as possible to the way you would have wanted. Images will be embedded using HTML, while file types that Mail can display inline but Outlook can’t, such as PDFs, will be added as attachments, with a reference in the email text to the attachment that’s supposed to be there. You can customise these references by clicking on Details… and entering new text into the Attachment placeholder box.

If you want to know if someone might not see a message the way you intended, click Warn about possible incompatibilities before sending and Mail will warn you if there are problems and suggest a solution.

Quick Tip

Ticking the Always display full attachment names box in the Viewing preferences will ensure that the full filenames of attachments are displayed in windows.