Detach Thunderbird Attachments

Thunderbird saves email attachments together with mail message which means that mailboxes can grow rapidly in size if you receive large attachments regularly. The main reason for this is that files are usually a lot larger than email content.
This slows down Thunderbird eventually when the mailbox reaches a certain size, and could also pose a storage issue depending on where the mailboxes are stored on the local system.
Thunderbird offers two possibilities to handle attachments in a different way.
The first option is to save attachments and delete them afterwards in the mail folder, and the second to detach attachments from emails by replacing the attachment with a link to it instead.
Both options are available when you right-click the attachment in the attachment pane. The pane is displayed below the message if that message contains at least one attachment.
You would then select Save As, Detach, or Delete from the context menu depending on what you want to do with that attachment. Options to save, delete or detach all attachments are available as well.
Please note that you may only find the open, save, delete and detach options in the context menu of newer versions of Thunderbird, as the "All" entries are displayed as a button in the attachment interface instead.
You can highlight select attachments to only save the highlighted ones and not all or individual attachments.
While this is fine if you do receive attachments every know and then it becomes a lot of work if you receive emails with attachments regularly.The Thunderbird extension Attachment Extractor provides you with the means to handle attachments semi-automatically in the email client.
This add-on can process complete folders and save, detach or delete all attachments found inside plus auto-extract attachments from mails automatically. This is far easier and better if you receive lots of mails with attachments and want them stored on a different drive or detached from the mailbox.
Update: The Attachment Extractor extension for Thunderbird has not been updated since October 2011. The last version the developer has made available on the Thunderbird Extensions repository is a development version that lacks some of the features and has not been released officially because of this. It is not clear whether the developer has put the project on ice or if it will be updated in the near future again.
You can alternatively use Mailstore Home to backup old messages to reduce the size of the mailbox this way.


You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!