Why are attachments so difficult in Mail???

[rexone]

There is one thing that many, many users complain about that Apple just seems to have no interest in fixing - attachments in their Mail app.
I used to use the brilliant Attachment Tamer but Apple made it too hard for them to keep up-to-date so development ceased.
As I use Mac for my small business & am often dealing with clients on Windows I'm now back to the complaints like... 'I can't get that attachment out of the e-mail...' or 'the attachment only appears as a thumbnail & I can't use it...' etc etc.
I mean seriously? Why can't Apple get this sorted out? If a small plug-in from a tiny developer was able to solve the problems how come Apple's whole development team can't (or won't...) solve it?
Anyone have any suggestions for an app or plug-in to use now that Attachment Tamer is no more?

 

[Goatllama]

Wait, isn't there a built in option to 'send Windows friendly attachments?' Does that not work for you?

 

[rexone]

Wait, isn't there a built in option to 'send Windows friendly attachments?' Does that not work for you?

Yes there is & I use it but it is very random in its effectiveness.
I select it with every e-mail I send that contains attachments even when I know it's going to another Mac user.

 

[Goatllama]

Yes there is & I use it but it is very random in its effectiveness.
I select it with every e-mail I send that contains attachments even when I know it's going to another Mac user.

Hmmm, does there seem to be any pattern to the apparent randomness? It may be a quirk of the various email clients when viewed through a mail application. If people use webmail they can get around all this hassle, I'm sure. Well, that might create further problems as well with the quality of some webmail. Either way, at least Apple is trying! I can definitely understand that sometimes their quest for elegance should be overthrown by functionality, though.

 

[rexone]

Hmmm, does there seem to be any pattern to the apparent randomness? It may be a quirk of the various email clients when viewed through a mail application.

No pattern that I have established & there's little point in trying to trouble-shoot with the recipients as often there's little they can do & they often have limited understanding of such things.
It's getting to a stage now where I just zip anything I need to attach but the problem there is that many corporate e-mail servers auto-quarantine zip files...

Either way, at least Apple is trying! I can definitely understand that sometimes their quest for elegance should be overthrown by functionality, though.

Yes... very trying... form over function does seem to be the order of the day at times...
What I find infuriating is, as I said in my original post, that the Attachment Tamer plug-in solved the problems.
Why doesn't Apple just adopt the same approach? Have advanced attachment options available as preferences settings.

 

[Admiral]

With Apple acquiring a company every day of the week it seems, why don't they acquire some of those Mail.app add-on developers? That's what I want to know.

 

[Goatllama]

Well, as a not-so-fun workaround you could use your webmail to send emails instead of Apple's application. I know it's a crappy sort of thing to have to do but at least it would make it a little easier and more consistent for you, and less .zip files is plus.

In the meantime, we always have apple.com/feedback to vent our frustrations.

 

[AlliePallie]

Hmmmm.
I have been using Mail Attachments for long, complex PDFs for a long time with few problems. Those few problems, except for two, were solved by asking all recipients to upgrade Adobe Reader to the latest version.
OTOH, those two problems were solved by running Disk Warrior.

 

[Canubis]

Did you try the option to put attachments at the end of the email (same menu as send attachments windows compatible). Documents like PDF etc never caused problems for me. Only complain I used to hear from people using Outlook was that sometimes images are displayed like an attachment at their end but other times it's embedded into the document.

Honestly I feel like this is at least part the fault of how attachment displaying is implemented in Outlook. On the Mac you can always just drag an drop or save any attachment from an email. In Outlook there are huge differences how images that are displayed embedded are handled and how others are. But in the end it's just data. So my experience is if both options are ticked even images are usually interpreted by Outlook as attachments.

 

[Phil in ocala]

In order to justify their existence on the Apple payroll...Geeks need to constantly change applications...fixing things that were not broken....the primary value of the Apple OS and its software used to be simplicity...that is GONE and its not coming back...how many remember when you could bounce junk mail back to the user????????? That's gone...I think some people in Cupertino need to get their butts kicked.