removed attachment is still there but not accessible (OL 2003)

[Wilfried]

Hello all
(last week I posted this question to microsoft.public.outlook ,
but got no reply up to now, so I now try it here)

(Outlook from Office 2003 SP3)
I deleted an attachment from a message by the standard procedure:
Open message, right-click on attachment line in header section and
select "remove".
The attachment is no longer displayed in the header section.
As the reason is that I want to prevent my .pst file from growing too
large, I looked at the message size and saw that it still is 5MB (same
as before).
If I open the message, select "view - options" (I hope I correctly
translated this to English, but I'm not sure) and look at the "header
lines", I can see that the attachment is still there:

- --- copied from message --- -
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
....
------=_NextPart_000...
Content-Type: application/msword;
name="word_doc.doc"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="word_doc.doc"
....following a lot of encoded stuff...
- --- ------------------- --- -

Compressing the outlook.pst doesn't help.

How can I actually remove this attachment?
Or if something went wrong, restore it and then repeat removing it?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Everything is as it should here;
-A pst-file from 5MB isn't now where near "too large". In terms of a
pst-file this is actually tiny.
-As a pst-file is a database file, white space (generated by deleted items)
isn't directly returned for performance reasons. Without that, the pst-file
would grow and shrink constantly killing your disks performance.
-Of course the message header still shows that the message was delivered
with an attachment; it did. It is no indication of what you changed to it
later; it is an indication of how it was delivered.

 

[Wilfried]

Hello and thank you for your reply.
However, it seems you didn't correctly understand what I wrote.

Everything is as it should here;
-A pst-file from 5MB isn't now where near "too large". In terms of a
pst-file this is actually tiny.

The 5 MB is NOT the size of the pst-file but the size of the message,
indicated in the mailbox listing.
The whole pst file is 51 MB and contains only the messages of the last 3
months. Auto-Archive is ON.
I know that the 5 MB alone aren't a problem, but this will not be the
only message from which I want to remove the attachment, so I want to
know once and for ever how to actually remove attachments.

-As a pst-file is a database file, white space (generated by deleted items)
isn't directly returned for performance reasons. Without that, the pst-file
would grow and shrink constantly killing your disks performance.

That is clear. However if I explicitly tell Outlook to compact the pst
file, shouldn't then the deleted objects be removed?

-Of course the message header still shows that the message was delivered
with an attachment; it did. It is no indication of what you changed to it
later; it is an indication of how it was delivered.

No.
What I cited a small part of, is actually the whole encoded message, not
only the headers. I can even copy the whole raw message from the window
"view - options" "header lines" and paste it into an ascii editor. It
consists of 30925 lines. Now don't tell me the message has 30925 header
lines.
I DO know how a raw message is encoded. I used Eudora for years, but now
I'm forced to use Outlook. Eudora's mailbox format is plain text and
thus easily editable, contrary to Outlook's binary format.

 

[Wilfried]

I now start a new subject because I have some more information.
The old thread started with Message-ID
<[email protected]>


I got another message with large attachments.
The received message was indicated in the inbox to be 12 MB of size.
After removing the attachments the message size is 9 MB.
So removing the attachments and compacting the pst file principally
works, but:
It seems that the decoded attachments are removed but the Base64-encoded
version in the raw message text is still there.
As the aim of the action is to save space in the pst file, reducing the
message size from 12 MB to still 9 MB is of not much worth.
I only need to keep the body text of the message and the headers, which
should need not more than 100 kB.

How can I make Outlook remove also the encoded version of the
attachments?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

I got another message with large attachments.
The received message was indicated in the inbox to be 12 MB of size.
After removing the attachments the message size is 9 MB.
So removing the attachments and compacting the pst file principally
works, but:
It seems that the decoded attachments are removed but the Base64-encoded
version in the raw message text is still there.
As the aim of the action is to save space in the pst file, reducing the
message size from 12 MB to still 9 MB is of not much worth.
I only need to keep the body text of the message and the headers, which
should need not more than 100 kB.

How can I make Outlook remove also the encoded version of the
attachments?

You could change the message format to Plain Text.

 

[Wilfried]

You could change the message format to Plain Text.

The message is already in Plain Text format (and was so as received).
It has a plain text body and encoded attachments. Sent from another OL
2003.

 

[Wilfried]

The message is already in Plain Text format (and was so as received).
It has a plain text body and encoded attachments. Sent from another OL
2003.

It seems to be caused by setting the registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail
DWORD: SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders
Value: 1

I'll report when I have tested whether deleting this key or setting it
to 0 helps (not before January 2009).

 

[Wilfried]

It seems to be caused by setting the registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail
DWORD: SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders
Value: 1

I'll report when I have tested whether deleting this key or setting it
to 0 helps (not before January 2009).

Well, changing this reg-key solved the problem.

When I started using Outlook, I had problems with incorrect display of
messages from someone using a Macintosh, so I had set this reg key to
see whether the message was correctly encoded. We got the Mac problem
solved by setting an option on the Mac. Then I forgot I had set that reg
key, and I was not aware that this reg key makes Outlook store each
attachment twice, once encoded (MIME message) and once decoded, and that
only the decoded attachment can be removed from the message.