Attachment Extractor F.A.Q.

These are a para-phrased summary of the most common questions I've been asked about Attachment Extractor and its development. Please read them and if you're considering contacting me asking any of the following then think again because I'm just going to ignore you.

• "Why don't you add a link to the deleted attachment in the email? "
  • I've lost track of how many times I've been asked this question! I've only not put this up previously as its not even a question about AttachmentExtractor - its down to a confusion about 'detach' vs 'delete'. If you 'delete' the attachment there is no link to anything; if you 'detach' the attachment then the attachment icon will still link to the detached attachment. This is standard Thunderbird behaviour and I'm not planning to extend this functionality as its adequate in my opinion.
• "Why is there an annoying pop-up message confirming if you want to delete the attachments? Can't you override this? "
  • As of version 0.8 you just need to enable AE's internal deleting/detaching (in settings|general). You will still get a confirmation once per task (in case the option was accidentally enabled).
• "I don't want any confirmation at all. I'm reckless and like to live life on the edge. Is there a way? "
  • Yes, though very unadvisable. There is a preference attachmentextractor.actionafterextract.detach.confirm which can be set to false to turn it off. If you can't work out how to do this yourself then its too advanced for you.
• "Is there a way to automatically extract/delete/detach attachments as they arrive in my Inbox - as opposed to having to right-click and choose 'Extract all attachments'? "
  • Yes, now you can in version 0.9. You need to enable it first in settings|auto-extract. If you don't want every email auto-extracted then set up a message filtering rule that adds the tag AE AutoExtract to applicable emails and set the auto-extract settings to only extract those.
• "My signed mails don't extract properly or do extract but the mail is broken afterwards. What's up?"
  • Cryptographically signed emails (using PGP or similar) seem to be a problem with the current versions of AttachmentExtractor. I don't use signed emails myself so it hadn't occured as an issue. I aim to fix this for a future version.
• "Can the default save folder or auto extract folder be stored relative to another folder?"
  • As of AttachmentExtractor 1.3.1, yes. The preferences attachmentextractor.defaultsavepath.relative.key or attachmentextractor.autoextract.savepath.relative.key should be set to the key for the location. The 'key' can be any of the built in locations specified in Thunderbird. See reference page for a list.
• "Attachment Extractor uses 100% of my CPU power when extracting. Can't you stop it from doing this?"
  • The CPU being 100% is down to Thunderbird and AE don't do anything that Thunderbird can't do itself, it just does it faster than you could yourself. So, no.
• "AttachmentExtractor doesn't work or tells me something has gone wrong."
  • First, try installing the most recent version from here.
    If you've already got the latest version or that doesn't fix it then please file a bug in the bugtracker, including your OS, version of Thunderbird, locale (if not the standard en-US release). Please check Tools|JavaScript Console for any error messages and include these too.