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jasnw

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 15, 2013
1,067
1,140
Seattle Area (NOT! Microsoft)
Since there appears to be no way to automate the saving of mail attachments in the Apple Mail app (no way that actually works), I'm looking for an alternative mail app that will allow you to do this. I've tried Applescript triggered by a rule to do this, but Apple has broken something inside Mail that makes it impossible to do this on El Capitan (works if I trigger the rule manually, but won't work automatically - long story). Anyway, my hack-around is to use another mail app for this one purpose with a special mail account set up for this one purpose. If that won't work, the other is to traverse through the Mail app's tangled mailbox directory structure looking for newly downloaded attachments.
 
I gave up on this and wrote the python-based Mail directory traverser I mentioned. Then I got mad at Apple and built a simple python script that allows me to automatically fetch email from any POP3 account and extract the attachments (32 lines of python, although it took me a good half-day to figure it out!). I am hoping that like washing your car, this will cause Apple to "rain" all over my work and fix this problem in the Mail app.
 
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