Transfer iOS email attachment to Mac or PC

[ozaz]

I had an situation today where the local network was down (no internet on PCs) and I needed to transfer an email attachment to a PC.

I was able to receive the email on my iPhone via the phone/cellular network but could not figure out how to transfer this file to my PC even though I had a USB cable to connect the iPhone to the PC and iTunes on the PC.

How can I transfer an email attachment from iOS mail to a Mac or PC without relying on internet or network connectivity?

Thanks

 

[Zcott]

Depends on the attachment type. If you have an app where you can open up the attachment, open the attachment in that app then just connect it to your computer, go over to the apps tab and you'll see your attachment there. Just drag it over to the desktop.

 

[ozaz]

Thanks. The attachment was a licence file. It was basically a text file but with .lic as extension instead of .txt.

When I click on the extension in mail on iPhone, I get option to open in dropbox or Evernote. However, neither of these apps seem to support file sharing with iTunes.

Are there any apps which can act as catch-all file openers/containers that do support file sharing with iTunes?

 

[Beelzbub]

Forward the email from your iPhone to another account, check that account on the computer. This works with other file types like word and excel and PDF, I would assume it should work in this case too.

 

[WordMasterRice]

I had an situation today where the local network was down (no internet on PCs) and I needed to transfer an email attachment to a PC.
s

Forward the email from your iPhone to another account, check that account on the computer. This works with other file types like word and excel and PDF, I would assume it should work in this case too.

This makes it difficult.

 

[ozaz]

I've figured out a rather convoluted way of doing this when the method suggested by zcott (post 2) is not possible due to obscure file type. It requires Dropbox app and a download manager (I have tried Downloads Lite, but there seem to be loads of download managers to choose from).

1. First transfer attachment from Mail to Dropbox. Does not open the attachment, it just moves a copy to dropbox.

2. Then, either generate a Dropbox share link for the file and paste it into the download manager, or link the download manager to Dropbox account (if supported) to directly download the file.

3. Transfer file from download manager to PC via iTunes USB connection. To clarify, the download manager is required because the Dropbox app does not support file transfer via iTunes

 

[C DM]

I've figured out a rather convoluted way of doing this when the method suggested by zcott (post 2) is not possible due to obscure file type. It requires Dropbox app and a download manager (I have tried Downloads Lite, but there seem to be loads of download managers to choose from).

1. First transfer attachment from Mail to Dropbox. Does not open the attachment, it just moves a copy to dropbox.

2. Then, either generate a Dropbox share link for the file and paste it into the download manager, or link the download manager to Dropbox account (if supported) to directly download the file.

3. Transfer file from download manager to PC via iTunes USB connection. To clarify, the download manager is required because the Dropbox app does not support file transfer via iTunes

Aside from that alternative, something like this might also be doable using a (file) sharing app like iPhone Drive http://www.eightythreetech.com/phonedrive/ or FileApp http://www.digidna.net/fileapp, for example.

 

[ozaz]

Aside from that alternative, something like this might also be doable using a (file) sharing app like iPhone Drive http://www.eightythreetech.com/phonedrive/.

Thanks, just tried this app and it does work. I was able to transfer .lic file from Mail to Phone Drive and then to PC via iTunes file sharing (i.e. it bypassed Dropbox, when compared with earlier method).