Outlook utilities that save you time
EZDetach is an easy-to-use, flexible and powerful attachment management add-in for Microsoft Outlook. The primary reasons why you might want to use EZDetach are:
Attachments are usually the biggest reason for mailbox size growing too quickly. A huge mailbox can result in several issues:
EZDetach has an option to remove attachments from your mailbox while maintaining links between messages and attachments, so you can still open attachments from inside the messages.
With EZDetach, you can easily save many attachments from across multiple messages in one fell swoop. That is so much faster and easier than opening every message and using “Save As” on each attachment.
For example, imaging a recruiter who receives many attachments every day (most of them very descriptively named “resume.doc”). EZDetach can save them all in one fell swoop and even automatically rename them to include sender name in the file name, for example, “John Smith - resume.doc”.
There are many situations that require automatically processing incoming email attachments. For example, you might receive orders or feeds from vendors or job notifications that need to be processed or imported in a document management or a workflow system. You can use EZDetach features, such as integration with Outlook rules, AutoSave and Scheduler to automatically handle attachments without having to write any Outlook specific code. See the section below for details.
Read the rest of this User Guide for a full description of all EZDetach features.
There are several ways to use EZDetach to save Outlook email attachments as individual files outside of Outlook. You can run it manually, or you can configure EZDetach to save attachments automatically, without requiring any action on your part.
To run EZDetach manually, you invoke it by clicking the Save Attachments button on the Outlook toolbar, ribbon or right-click menu.
To open EZDetach, click on the EZDetach button, which is located on the Home tab of the Ribbon in Outlook 2010 or on the main Outlook toolbar in older versions of Outlook.
Tip
EZDetach is also available in the right-click menu in the main Outlook window.
You will see the Save Attachments window:
Next time you invoke EZDetach, it remembers the options you used previously. So if you are saving with the same settings, you can simply click Save Now.
AutoSave (new in EZDetach 6.0) allows you to map Outlook folders to file system folders. Such that whenever a message is moved or copied to a particular Outlook folder, it is automatically saved to the corresponding file system folder.
If you have folders for your projects or clients in both Outlook and file system (local hard drive or a shared drive on a file server), you can easily keep their attachments in sync.
To configure an AutoSave folder:
Open the Mapped Folders window. (Advanced Options -> General Tab -> Manage destination folder preferences -> Manage folder mapping).
Click Add. You will see the Folder Mapping window.
Select the Outlook folder you would like to map.
Specify the corresponding destination folder.
Check Automatically save new attachments from this folder (AutoSave).
Click OK.
Now whenever a new message lands in that folder, its attachments will be saved in the folder you specified.
Note
AutoSave only works when Outlook is running. If a new message arrives directly into that folder when Outlook is closed, AutoSave will not pick it up. To deal with cases like that, also configure a scheduler for the same folder whenever you use AutoSave.
Tip
AutoSave is a perfect feature to use in combination with our SimplyFile product. SimplyFile is a much more efficient alternative to filing email messages into Outlook folder using drag and drop. You can have AutoSave automatically save attachments from a message, whenever you file it using SimplyFile.
EZDetach supports automatically saving attachments at pre-defined time using the scheduler.
To configure the scheduler:
Open the Scheduler tab. (Advanced Options -> Scheduler Tab).
Follow the directions on this tab to specify:
Warning
In most cases when using the scheduler, you want to either remove attachments and replace them with links or enable “Do not process messages which have been processed before”, located on the History Tab of the Advanced Options window. Otherwise, a new copy of every attachments will be saved every time the scheduler runs.
EZDetach implements an Outlook custom rule action. This means that EZDetach can be called from an Outlook rule. You can create rules to automatically save attachments from new messages which match a set of criteria you specify.
To create a rule with EZDetach:
Create an Outlook rule that matches the messages which you would like to save. See the Microsoft website for instructions on creating rules.
In the “What do you want to do with the message?” step check the “perform a custom action” option.
Click on “a custom action” hyperlink in the “Rule Description” window.
Select “EZDetach” in the “Choose an action to be performed” drop-down box.
Click “Change...” button.
Select the options you would like to use for this rule.
Note
These options are specific to the rule. Different rules can have different options. For example, you can have multiple rules to save different types of attachments to different folders.
Click the “OK” button to save the rule options.
Click the “OK” button in the “Select Custom Action” window.
Finish creating the rule as usual.
Please refer to Outlook documentation for details on creating and working with rules.
EZDetach has an option to replace attachments with Attachment Links. Attachment links behave very much like normal attachments. Messages retain an attachment indicator (paperclip); you can double-click on a link to open the original file.
The big benefit of attachment links is that they take up significantly less space than the original attachment. Replacing attachments with link can result in a significant reduction in your mailbox size.
For example, here is an attachment in Outlook (Report.docx). It’s size is 2 megabyte.
Here is an attachment link, which replaced the original attachment. Its size is only 257 bytes.
If you decide that you would like to put attachment back into messages, you can use the Reattach Links command in the Link Maintenance Window.
If you need to forward a message with attachment links to somebody else, EZDetach can prompt you to reattach files when you send the message (after clicking “Send”). Only the forwarded message will have files re-attached, the original email with retain links. This option is used to enable the reattach prompt.