Spooty Attachment Extractor v2.30
| Q: | What is the "Cut Attachments" feature and how does it work? |
| A: | The "Cut Attachments" feature is used for saving space and eliminating duplicate files. Once you have extracted an attachment from your mailbox, you likely won't want to keep the encoded copy that's still in the email. This encoded copy is 33% bigger than the actual file because of the way it has to be transferred through mail servers. When you extract attachments a 2nd, and 3rd time, you will also not want to extract the same attachments again and create duplicate copies. By cutting the attachments, you ensure that they will not be extracted again. The text in the emails that held the cut attachments is left untouched by an intelligent email parser, and can thus be kept or deleted later manually. |
| Q: | Why is there a warning when i use the "Cut Attachments" feature for Outlook Express? |
| A: | Because of a bug in Outlook Express, it will exhibit erroneous behaviour when you try to cut attachments from a mailbox that is roughly 1.8GB and larger. We have tested Spooty Attachment Extractor on various mailboxes of all sizes, with thousands upon thousands of emails in each, and found that the "Cut Attachments" feature works just fine - but only if the mailbox is not too big. You are warned because even though your mailbox is in perfect order according to the freely available specifications on Outlook Express mailboxes, and will continue to be parsed correctly by Spooty Attachment Extractor, Outlook Express will not view the mailbox this way, will disallow any compacting of the mailbox, and might display error messages when you try to view some emails. With all of that in mind, we believe it is best to make backups of your mailboxes before attempting the "Cut Attachments" feature just in case Outlook Express starts exhibiting the erroneous behaviour we have seen and you do not wish to try to work around it as described later in this FAQ. |
| Q: | Whose fault is the large mailbox + "Cut Attachments" bug? |
| A: | We believe this problem to lie within Outlook Express as per our extensive testing on large mailboxes (upto the maximum limit, 2GB) with thousands of emails from many different sources. The errors given by Outlook Express are also nonsensical and by no means verbose ("The folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or by another application" - when you try to compact the mailbox). You can also recover the emails by moving about 500 at a time to a new mailbox, which is further proof that the mailbox has not been corrupted and Outlook Express is simply behaving badly. |
| Q: | I've used the "Cut Attachments" feature and now Outlook Express won't read emails in my mailbox or says "The folder is currently in use by Outlook Express or by another application" when i try to compact it. |
| A: | You cannot compact the mailbox in the normal way due to a bug in Outlook Express. To work around this bug and "compact" the mailbox, create a new mailbox, and then using the shift key, select about 500 emails from the original mailbox, and drag them to the new mailbox. Do not try to move too many emails in one go or Outlook Express will popup an error. You can then attempt to compact the mailbox. If successful, simply move the moved emails back into your original mailbox (they will be compacted as they are moved), and then either compact or delete the temporary mailbox. If unsuccessful, keep moving about 500 emails out of the mailbox at a time until the compaction works. |
| Q: | What happens if a file already exists in the extraction folder that has an attachment's filename? |
| A: | The attachment will be saved as "filename_x.ext", where "x" represents how many files already have that base name + 1. |
