How to autosave attachments in Mail.app / Thunderbird?

Hello,

I have a problem with Mail.app that has been bugging me for a long time now.

Back when I used Eudora on my PC, all attachments (Word docs, Excel docs, pictures etc) were autosaved to an attachments folder outside the mail application. This mean that on the desktop, if i wanted to track down a document, I could do a general search in all word docs on my computer. Most useful.

Now, with Mail.app (and I think, with Thunderbird) attachments are stored by default with the mail inside the .mbox file (i think). This means I can't search for the particular document, or search the contents of the attachments.

I find this very frustrating, as I get sent a lot of attachments and I don't want to have to manually save each and every attachment in each new email i receive, on the off-chance that I might want to search in it later.

Is there any way, either in mail.app or in Thunderbird of autosaving all attachments in an attachment folder (a desktop folder not a mailbox style folder) without any action on my part? Can I apply this to an entire folder of old mail with attachments?

Many thanks

Thanks Mitthrawnuruodo, will certainly do that for all my old messages.

As for creating a new AppleScript to save attachments in new mail..

Have now had a look in the applescripts folder, looked at a few mail scripts, and concluded that a simple thing like this is actually well beyond the fragments of coding that I remember from my student days.

Could someone give me an example of an applescript to do this? I really don't want to risk mangling up my precious emails ... 🙁

Many thanks

Tomato