GearMage’s Mail Attachment Downloader is a free software for Windows that is used in this guide. You can download the software from the developer website free of charge. The program supports AOL, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail Plus out of the box, and offers configuration options for other email services that allow POP3 or IMAP connections.

All emails and files on the server will be left untouched as the developers have configured the program to read only. This is reassuring as it keeps the original emails and attachments as backup on the mail server. This does mean however that you need to delete attachments on the server manually if you need to free up storage space.

It starts with the configuration of an email account that you want to download email attachments from. Mail Attachment Downloader saves previously configured accounts, which can be helpful if you download attachments regularly. You need to make sure on the other hand that no unauthorized user gets access to the program, especially so if you save the mail password during configuration.

You can click on connect and download right away to establish a connection with the pop3 or imap mail server, or configure settings in the various tabs of the application window. A log is generated on every connect, which can provide information on errors. It is a good starting point if you encounter connection or mail server authorization errors.

Basic and advanced filters are available to display and download only specific attachments. The available options include:

• Download only attachments with a size greater than
• Check only new messages or all messages
• Download only specific file types, for instance movies, documents, pictures or custom file types.
• Download attachments that have been received in a specific period of time, option to configure start and end dates individually
• Filter messages by sender, subject or body

You can furthermore run scheduled regular downloads of attachments, for instance hourly or daily, which opens up interesting email backup options.

Mail Attachment Downloader is a handy tool for users who want to download specific or all email attachments from their email accounts. The program is compatible with all versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows XP on.

Alternatives are available. Thunderbird users can install the add-on Attachment Extractor, Outlook users the Microsoft Outlook Attachment Extractor or Outlook Attachment Remover Add-in. Both tools have the advantage that they work on the local system with already downloaded emails, which means that they do not have to be configured to work with specific mail accounts and email providers first.

FTP Mail Zipper offers another possibility. It combines as the name suggest capabilities to zip, ftp and mail files. It can automatically zip files that are added to its interface and upload them to a ftp server. The information to download the files from the ftp server are then added to the email that is send to the recipient.

Some settings have to be configured during the first startup. This includes adding at least one ftp with account information to the program. FTP Mail Zipper supports ftp profiles which make it possible to switch quickly between different ftps.

It is furthermore possible to use an email template which will then be used automatically when sending the email to the recipient. The application has also an option to list the hosted files that have already been uploaded to ftp servers with the option to delete, rename or download those files.

FTP Mail Zipper is a handy portable software program for the Windows operating system. It is compatible with most versions of the Windows operating system and can be downloaded from the Freeware Files website.

These Outlook email attachments are then displayed in the usual table format that Nirsoft uses in most of their software programs which gives the user options to sort the data in all possible ways. The information that are extracted from the Outlook emails are the filename of the email attachment, the recipient, file size and data of creation among other values.

Email attachments can be selected by the user to retrieve additional information about them. It is possible to save email attachments by selecting them and clicking on the Save selected items button in the software program. It is furthermore possible to delete selected email attachments directly in the software as well. This could be a handy way of copying email attachments from Outlook to another hard drive to free up some disk space.

The list of email attachments that has been found can be exported into various formats including text, html and xml. A few command line parameters are available to export the email attachments directly. There is however no way to access the Microsoft Outlook attachments of another user of the computer system.