E-mail attachments can eat up a lot of mailbox space. But most users don't want to deal with the hassle of breaking them off messages manually to
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save them elsewhere.
Outlook Attachment Sniffer (OAS) 4.1 is a shareware Outlook add-on (free for 30 days; $15 for upgrades) that spares users from having to manage their attachments individually.
It can strip and save attachments from e-mails already in a given folder, in selected messages, or in messages as they're delivered.
It also can inspect messages recursively -- i.e., if you have an attachment that has been forwarded many times and is "nested" several messages down, OAS will drill down through each attachment layer and inspect them all.
After installing OAS, you can configure the program to inspect incoming e-mails based on specific criteria -- whether it matches certain sender/recipient filters, for instance -- and what actions to take on filtered mail.
Of course, its main function is saving attachments, and users can optionally specify that attachments should be removed from e-mail after being saved. When an attachment is removed, OAS can also replace its reference in the message with a link to the file saved on disk, so it can still be accessed easily.
Other options include marking mail as read/unread, moving/copying to specific folders, or deleting mail wholesale. OAS also supports a broad variety of options for saving messages and attachments -- auto-generated file names, .EML or other formats for the message body, auto-saving of attachments into a linked folder, and so on. All actions can be logged for later inspection.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter.
This was first published in November 2005
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