The macro is really designed to work in batch/silent mode, so rather than prompting you for a location for each message it just goes to work. It is definitely possible to modify this and have it prompt you for a save location on each message. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to maintain this macro and add new features – that is why the Google Code project was started. I would recommend posting a request on the project page.

-Carl

This is probably one of the best Codes for VBA ive ever seen. But one question left. Is it possible to replace the fix root string with a dirlistbox like the one of John Walkenbach. im not a programmer, but i think for you its done in heartbeat. the rest works perfect and thanks for all your work

Greetings Kurt

The code places a text-only *copy* of the message in the attachment folder for reference, but the original message is not moved. The size of the message will change since the attachments are removed. If you are sorting the message list by size, the message will jump to a different location in the sort order. It may looks like it is gone, but it is likely still in the folder. Hopefully that is the case.

-Carl

Thansk

For item 2, you can try to adjust the threshold size to exclude smaller messages. Another possibility is checking attachment types. OLE objects are already excluded (see oleFound flag).

If those suggestions don’t help, I would recommend posting to the group where the source code is now maintained.

Hope that helps!

-Carl

Great VBA Macro ! congratulations. I previously used “Attachment Remover” a free plug-in for IE but with the last rules of my IT management I have had to remove it (it’s not authorized !).
Your macro is working fine and is very well documented but I have a few questions (I didn’t find the answers in the present forum).
1- For a few e-mails with various attachments (not a certain type) I get an error message
[RemoveAttachments() Subroutine
Error Code: -2147467259]
It is the command line [objMsg.SaveAs msgFolder & msgSubject & ".txt", olTXT] which induces this error
Do you have a suggestion to solve this issue ?
2- With e-mails where there are pictures (*.jpg mainly) inside (not attached) the macro also removes these pictures.
Is it possible not to remove these pictures ?

Many thanks in advance for your support

L. Iquidenbar

There are also a lot of attachment management tools listed on the Slipstick Systems website. There may be some free ones there that are pretty decent, but I haven’t really tried any of them.

-Carl

To quickly forward the message with its original attachments intact, I first click the folder link to open the folder. I then forward the message. In the edit window of the forwarded message, I drag the files to attach them. I also delete the list of links and the “Attachments Removed” attachment. It does take a few steps, but it’s not too bad if you use the folder link.

Another tip is to not run the macro on messages right away. I usually run the macro on older messages that have already been filed so it is less likely that I’ll need to forward them.

You could also use a commercial tool like the one Marty mentions below.

Hope that helps!

Marty

I agree, that was definitely something I was hoping to add. If you dig into the macro code, you’ll notice that the links inserted into the email are tagged with the link type of “REL=ATT_LNK”. This is sort of a made up tag I used to indicate “attachment links”. I was hoping a later version of the code could use these links to find the original attachment and replace it when a message is forwarded.

I haven’t had much time to enhance this code, which is why I agreed to let it move to the open source project. You may want to raise this request on the project page there.

-Carl

-Carl

Great bit of code. Is there anyway of adopting this to remove attachments in calendar items?

Removing the following code does not help, errors out with 438 object does not support property or method.

“If objMsg.Class = olMail Then”

Many thanks, Steve.

-Carl

if you send me your email, I can add you to developers group.

-Carl

attFileName = Strings.Format(objMsg.ReceivedTime, “yyyy.mm.dd.hhnnss”) & objAttachments.Item(i).FileName

I added the time stamp to the filename.. haha.. sorry for flooding

What i tried to do is,
attFileName = objAttachments.Item(i).FileName
attPath = msgFolder & “\\” & attFileName

And replaced it with
attFileName = attFileName = Strings.Format(objMsg.ReceivedTime, “yyyy.mm.dd.hhnnss”)
attPath = msgFolder & “\\” & attFileName

It “sort of” works, but the file is now an unrecognizable file in my window’s folder with the yyyy.mm.dd.hhnnss filename.

i’m stuck…

The only distinction is that these emails are sent at different times.

What do i tweak to the macro in oder to
step 1) strip the attachments over to my windows folder
step 2) rename the attachments according to the time/date stamp of the email?

Please help? Thanks!

Sam

-Carl

Fantastic!

Are you aware of anyone having created a script to delete the saved attachment when a mail message is deleted to keep the attachment folder as tidy as your inbox?

I guess if the attachment is named with logic the same logic could be applied to find and destroy the attachment triggered by the BeforeDelete event.

I’m no programmer so maybe a more accomplished writer may have already done the script?

Thanks again,
Jonny.

[0] I guess I assumed you would not want to edit the folder names. Depending on how many folders you would have to edit (10, 100, 1000?) it may not be worth the effort.

[1] Regarding the notifications, unfortunately that’s not available. I thought about disabling comments altogether and instead implementing a forum. It’s great that there is more interactive discussion going on, and that would probably be easier to do with a proper forum.

[2] I think it would be good to move the macro to someplace like GoogleCode or SourceForge. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to set it up or maintain it. If you are motivated to do it, it’s all yours! All I would ask is that you keep a reference link back to the original post here.

[3] Very good catch on the “#” character, nice work! I haven’t run into that problem, but was able to reproduce it after you pointed it out. The “#” is a valid path/file name character in Windows, so I’m not sure why Outlook is choking on it. The easiest fix is to just add it to the invalid character list on this line:

invalidChars = Array(“\”, “/”, “:”, “*”, “?”, “”"”, “”, “|”, “…”)

That seemed to work just fine.

-Carl

Two more questions:
1 – Doesn’t dis blog notify users about replies to comments?!?
2 – Isn’t it time to put this project on GoogleCode for better management?
http://code.google.com

Thanks again for your comments. You had also asked about going back to messages that were previously processed and re-processing them to have shorter links. I think that will be very tricky. There is a field I added to the links to help you search on ones created by this macro. If you notice in the code, the file links contain a reference “REL=ATT_LNK” to help identify them. “ATT_LNK” was just something I made up in case I had to search for those links later. You could create a separate macro that searches the HTML body of each message and edits those links if they are too long based on certain criteria. The problem, however, is that the actual path names on disk will then not match and you will have broken links. (Unless I am misunderstanding your question?) Creating a macro that changed both the links inside the message and the real folder path on disk would be a lot of work. I think it would be easiest to just retrieve those attachments where you have path length errors by manually browsing for the folder. Since only certain messages would be affected, and the folders are named/sorted by the message date, it should be relatively easy to find. I just don’t think it would be worth your time to go backwards and try to re-process older messages.

-Carl

On Error GoTo ErrorHandler

Also, there is currently an issue with running this macro on 100+ messages at once (at least if all 100 have attachments). See comments above from September 17th, 2009 at 12:27 pm. If you run this on a folder with 3000 emails I’m sure you will see this issue. I don’t have a workaround for this yet.

-Carl

Does your version of the macro contain this line?
If objMsg.Class = olMail Then

If yes, try clicking on DEBUG button upon enconutering the error you mentioned, and try determining WHICH message exactly is raising the error: it should have “something strange”…
Use:
print objmsg.senton

it should print date of creation/receipt of the messagem thus allowing you to easily find it.
————-

Apart from this, how can I fix the messages processed with previous version of macro which had the “too long folder” issue preventing from opening the attachments with a click?
(see comment July 17th, 2009 at 2:41 pm )

question: an error occurs when i run the macro on too many emails i get the following error
“error code: -2147467259
Method ‘Attachments’ of object ‘MailItem’ failed”

any idea how i can run it for a folder of more than 3000+ emails?

thanks!

To force this error to happen, I had to select 100 or more messages that actually had attachments larger than the threshold. In my case, this meant selecting about 500 messages at once, since many of my messages either had smaller attachments or none at all. Everything does get cleaned up when the macro exists, so you can run it over and over again without any problems, as long as you select about 100 messages at a time. As a side note, I think Outlook is storing the temp files in a different location on my machine. I’ll have to look into what’s causing this.

Thanks for bringing this up!

-Carl

TheNextMessage:
Set objAttachments = Nothing
Set objMsg = Nothing
Next objMsg

But that doesn’t seem to be enough. — Antony

Outlook seems to be creating numbered copies of the “Attachments Removed” file in C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK

It can only handle up to 99 such files, hence unless I manually delete the files it creates as it’s running – it fails after 100 replacements. Any ideas on a correct fix?

Sometimes emails that I sent myself end up in my Inbox. Also, once emails are moved to the archive, they could be mixed together. That would make it hard to separate them using “.CurrentFolder.Name”, but the sender name will be the same even if the email is moved. Just an idea!

-Carl

Thanks for your suggestions! The progress bar sounds interesting. I’m not sure if I understand why you would want to add an “inbox” folder to the save path… Is that to separate attachments that you send from attachments that other people send to you? Sometimes I run this macro on a message after I have already moved it out of the inbox, so I’m not sure this modification would work for me.

-Carl

[...]
For i = objAttachments.Count To 1 Step -1
PartialAtt = PartialAtt + 1
ProgressGaugeAtt = Int(100 * PartialAtt / TotalAtt)
frmProgress.lblAttGauge.Width = ProgressGaugeAtt
frmProgress.lblAttPerc.Caption = Str$(ProgressGaugeAtt) & ” %”
frmProgress.lblAttPerc.Left = ProgressGaugeAtt + 20
DoEvents

[...]
You’ll need a form named frmProgress containing 4 labels (2 for messages and 2 for attachments)

And to distinguish inbox from outbox:

If InStr(UCase$(olns.Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Name), “INVIATA”) > 0 Then
msgFolder = RootFolder & “@inviata\\” & msgFolder & “\\”
Else
msgFolder = RootFolder & msgFolder & “\\”
End If

(but this is not portable fordifferenet languages, you must specify proper name for your outbox)

I put the “@” in front of folder name to have it always as first item listed in alphabetical order.

Apart from this, I think it could be useful to get the macro creating separate folders for inbox and outbox. To keep compatibility with current version, it could just create a separate folder for outbox, keeping inbox attachment in main folder.

I’m not sure why you are seeing this behavior. I’m able to adjust the THRESH constant and the macro skips messages smaller than that value. Maybe you could try hard-coding a threshold instead of using the constant. To do this, modify this line:
If (objMsg.Size < (1024 * THRESH)) Then
-Carl

There are several use cases, depending on how you prefer to work. With the modifications you made, you can strip attachments from your calendar items and probably go a year or more without having to clean anything out.

Also, as you mentioned, there is a performance hit from large fragmented PST files. It is a database, after all. Even though the PST size limit was significantly increased starting in OL2003, many people still recommend keeping your PST files below 2GB. There is some information on allowable PST sizes here, and some nice recommendations on how to speed up Outlook performance in general here.

Another use case is for messages in the Inbox. If you have a message with a large attachment but aren’t ready to move it offline yet, you can convert the attachment to a link. Also, if you are going to convert an email into a task, it’s a good idea to strip the attachments first since the task will likely take up space on your central server.

-Carl

Sounds like you got it. That is pretty much what I would have recommended, and I wouldn’t have thought of the HTMLBody change without trying it. Nice work.

I would say that even with attachment stripping, eventually your calendar will still need to be cleaned out. You *can* archive calendar items in your PST along side your mail items. Here are the steps I follow (about once every 3 months). These are for OL2003, so there may be slight differences in OL2007….

(1) Create a new folder in your PST and select “Calendar Items” instead of “Mail and Post Items” during the creation process. You can name it something like “Calendar Archive 2009″

(2) Go to your main calendar, then select View > Arrange By > Current View > Events. This should give you a list of calendar items instead of the calendar view.

(3) Sort by “Recurrence Range End” with the oldest items at the top. If Recurrence Range End is not a column, you will need to add it via the Field Chooser. This sort allows you to select meetings which are no longer needed without having to worry about losing recurring meetings.

(4) Select any meetings that have a Recurrence Range End that is more than a month old and drag them to the PST folder you created. For meeting you created, you may get a warning that says meeting responses will no longer be tracker. Just keep click OK until all the items are moved. If you are viewing the calendar items in groups, you will have to repeat this for each group.

(5) Reset your view back to Day/Week/Month (or whatever you prefer).

That’s it. I like to keep about 1 month of history in the main calendar. The other nice thing is that calendar items in the archive folder are still indexed by desktop search (WDS or GDS), so they turn up in your search results just like always.

It wouldn’t be hard to create a macro that selects any calendar items with Recurrence Range End older than N days and moves them to the Calendar Archive folder. That one is on my to-do list, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet

-Carl

- I replaced “If objMsg.Class = olMail Then” by “If 1 Then” to let all objects through

- For non-MailItem objects, I set msgSender to “” since the SenderName doesn’t exist for some of those other objects (such as AppoitmentItem objects)

- I Used CreationTime instead of ReceivedTime (which doesn’t exist for AppointmentItem objects)

- I utilized objMsg.HTMLBody only for MailItem objects. The other objects will use Obj.Body

We have storage quotas on our exchange server. Normal mail items I can easily move off to a PST file but it is very helpful to keep the calendar entirely on the exchange server. Attachments to calendar items eats up that quota very quickly.

Any ideas?

Thanks for the detailed suggestions! I’ll check them out and probably fold them into the original code. One comment on this line: msgFolder = Left(RootFolder & msgFolder & "\\", 150) If the “\\” is really needed, it might get truncated. I’ll have to check that… Maybe instead something like this to preserve the ending:

msgFolder = Left(RootFolder & msgFolder, 148) & "\\"

Anyway, thanks again for the suggestions!

-Carl

I noticed that this was said before, but it can happen sometimes that the macro runs into an error like Path not found or something like that due to the path name limitation to 256 chars. Therefore I made some changes to my local copy.

First, I replaced

attFileName = objAttachments.Item(i).FileName
attPath = msgFolder & "\\" & attFileName


by


Dim dotPos As Integer
attFileName = objAttachments.Item(i).FileName
Do
attPath = msgFolder & "\\" & attFileName
If Len(attPath) > 256 Then
dotPos = InStrRev(attFileName, ".")
If dotPos = 0 Then
attFileName = Left(attFileName, Len(attFileName) - 1)
Else
attFileName = Left(attFileName, dotPos - 2) & "." & Mid(attFileName, dotPos + 1)
End If
Else
Exit Do
End If
Loop


and then


msgFolder = RootFolder & msgFolder & "\\"


by


msgFolder = Left(RootFolder & msgFolder & "\\", 150)


Next, i noticed that someone sent me an email with a TAB character in the subject, which also caused an error. To catch this, I inserted this character in the invalid character list, so I exchanged


invalidChars = Array("\", "/", ":", "*", "?", """", "", "|", "…")


by


invalidChars = Array("\", "/", ":", "*", "?", """", "", "|", "…", Chr(9))


-Michael

-Carl

To answer your first question: Yes, just select multiple messages before launching the macro and it will step through each one stripping the attachments and inserting links. After that, you’ll want to select Properties for your PST file, go to Advanced, click the “Compact Now” button, then go out and get a coffee while it crunches on the file.

On your second question, this error may be causing the macro to stop after the first message is processed. Look at the message after processing… Does it now have an attachment named “Attachments Removed” or are there no attachments at all?

-Carl

Thanks!

What you are describing can probably be done, but it is something different than what this macro is intended to do. In your case you would probably need to replace the “Reply” button in the explorer toolbar and on the message toolbar with your own homemade reply function that retrieves the attachment names in the current message and appends them to the reply.

Otherwise, your user can select Forward instead, then manually paste names into the TO: and CC: fields and manually change the subject prefix from “FW” to “RE”.

-Carl

Anyway, I’ll post an updated macro when I get a chance. In the mean time, you can insert the following line right after the “msgSubject = Trim(msgSubject)” line:

msgSubject = Left(msgSubject, 60)

This will limit the subject length to the first 60 chars. Since the sender name as well as the date also ends up in the path name, I picked 60 chars in order to keep the whole thing under 90.

Hope that helps!

-Carl

This is a fantastic script !

However i noticed that every now and again the script would give a

” RemoveAttachment() Subroutine Error Code:
-2147467259 The operation failed”

error on certain emails with attachments.

After a lot of testing i’ve found that the problem occurs when the email subject title goes over 90characters. Below 90 and all is fine. Above 90 and you get the error stated above. Is there some way to either extend this character limit or if not – check for the subject title length and if over 90chars – chop a little off ?

all the very best

cHRISrs - Yes, the “Attachments Removed” file is not zero bytes. For messages with stripped attachments, I wanted the paperclip icon to still show up in Outlook for sorting & filtering. Adding a very small attachment was the only reliable way to preserve that. The attachment was created by making a zero-character file in note pad and naming it “Attachments Removed” without the .txt extension. Having this attachment also allows you to still search on messages with attachments in WDS or GDS. To answer your second question about skipping smaller files, the macro does this automatically now and you can set the threshold to whatever you like. My thinking is that a prompt on every message could get to be annoying after a while.

Ken - You could definitely modify the macro to do that. The subject is in objMsg.Subject. You could wrap the macro in an If statement and use some string functions to compare only the first (leftmost) 15 characters of the subject with your desired string. Alternatively, you could check the subject via an Outlook rule, then use the rule to run the macro on incoming messages (see comments above from 21-Jun-09). When the SaveAsFile command launches, it will overwrite the previous files if the pathname and filename are the same. The macro appends a date stamp to the pathname to prevent this from happening, so just remove that portion from the code above if you want files to be overwritten.

-Carl

I addd the “File Removed” attachment process to a VBA macro I developed for atachment processing. I outlook 2007 it shows as a 6 kb file and addes to the size of the message (5 or 6 kb) Is this your experiance?

I am trying to update my VBA routine to skip embeded images, etc. As you say, they are generally logos, etc that should stay in the message. For me the actual attachments are job related materials that need to be saved in job folders, regardless of size. It seems to me that for smaller files I will need to step through and prompt as to wheteher to save or not. Any thoughts? generally the

This seems to be related to specific messages and if I skip these ones its works fine. I can’t seem to find what the error is. Any ideas?

Colin

Nobody has reported this issue in the past, so not sure what might be causing it. It might be something with the new folder (path) it is creating for each message. Do you have any strange characters in the subject line that would not be valid in a folder name? I would recommend adding a few “MsgBox” commands at various points in the code so you can see how far it is getting before it exits. You can also comment out the “On Error GoTo ErrorHandler” line so that the VBA Macro debugger can take you to the exact line of the code when it stops.

Let me know what you find out from that, and I can probably provide some better suggestions.

-Carl

Depending on which tool you use to extract the zip file, it may try to create the folders for you. Basically, you have to have the “Attachments Removed” file in the “config” folder underneath whatever path you define in this line:

Const RootFolder = “C:\\Outlook Attachments\\2009\\”

Also note that the file has to have the name “Attachments Removed” with no .txt or other extension.

This should work on most messages. The message size has to be greater than the threshold you set, and it will skip messages with OLE attachments (usually RTF messages). For other formats, it will convert the message to HTML format and include the links.

Hope that helps.

-Carl

Once the macro is modified, you would create an Outlook rule that fired on each message and ran the macro on that message. To prevent the macro from running all the time, you can build the logic into the Outlook rule to only trigger when a message contains attachments and is larger than a certain size.

Good luck!

-Carl

very nice code. It works without problems.
One Question: Is it posibble to start the macro automaticly for every incoming mail? I think it must replace the “objSelectedItems As Outlook.Selection” with an other construction?

Greats
praetor

Const THRESH As Long = 100 ‘kb

For example, if you want to strip anything larger than 50kb, use:

Const THRESH As Long = 50 ‘kb

-Carl

Great work, thanks….

The code is a VBA macro the runs on the client side, so yes, it requires an Outlook client to be open. There may be options to do something similar with server-side scripting, but I have no experience there. One thing you can easily do is create a client rule that passes each incoming message to the macro for immediate processing. That would still require a client PC, but would be more automated.

Regarding your other question, it is definitely possible to have the macro copy the attachment without removing it from the message. Simply find this line in the code: “objAttachments.Item(i).Delete” and comment it out by placing a single quote ‘ in front of the line.

Hope that helps.

-Carl

Nice code! This is similar to what I have been looking for, would appreciate your help with the following.

Does your code require the outlook client to be open? Is there a way to run this at the server level?

We’re trying to build something to automatically detach .TXT files as they arrive, and save them to the appropriate folder, based on the inbound email address.

Emails to blue@test.com should have their .txt attachments saved to the BLUE_inbound folder; emails to red@test.com should have their .txt attachments saved to the RED_inbound folder;

Obviously, I don’t want to have to have outlook clients ‘open’ for this to run correctly.

My goal is to copy the .txt attachments, and place them somewhere where they can be processed on some regular basis. As such, I actually don’t want to strip them from the email; would rather copy the attachment out, and then move the email to a ‘processed’ subfolder.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Best, Karen

-Carl

Regarding a prompt for the user to select a path, that is definitely possible. First, you would need to prompt the user using something like this example. You may find additional examples on Sue Mosher’s site. Then, you store that response in a variable.

In the macro, the “msgFolder” variable is used as the save path. Just delete or comment out all of the lines in the macro that build the message folder path and instead use the path that the user provided via the dialog box. You may have to clean up the user response a little bit. For a first test, I would use the MsgBox command to display the contents of the msgFolder variable before trying to use it to write files.

Hope that helps, good luck!

-Carl

I do have a followup question though. Is it possible to change the script to prompt the user for an existing folder path to store the attachment? For example, I have a folder called “Projects” in My Documents with various Sub-folders representing the separate projects. I would like to detach the attachments to particular folders instead of always saving to the same file path. What would I need to do to change the code to prompt for a folder to save the file(s)?

The only problem I have is that I keep getting an error message each time I execute the macro. Even though I get the error message, the attachments are stripped, put into the C:\drive, the links are created in the email, and the *.txt file of the message is created. Just seems odd that I get the error message each time.

Is there something I missed in the setup?

RemoveAttachments() Subroutine

Error Code: -2044264445 (code varies each time I execute)
Path does not exist. Make sure the path is correct.