Harry,
Never thought of doing this before. Have no idea if there is some way of doing it in Outlook Express. I do know that these attachments are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\****(Folder)
where **** is a combination of letters and numbers.
 
Just as an experiment I found a particular attachment in Windows Explorer and deleted it. It did delete it; but for whatever reason, it also moved it to a different folder as long as it was attached to a message. It may have something to do with an indexing function. Interesting isn't?

That sounds like the file linking function in Explorer's options. The idea is that if you saved a webpage & consequently any pics used in it as well & then deleted the .htm file it would also delete the folder with the pics used on the page. In theory [never tried it] it would also do it the other way around. This could, if my theory about the reverse also being true is correct, delete an email if the email had been saved seperately.
 
Having said that though, to the best of my knowledge - emails aren't normally stored as seperate files, they're stored as compressed database files, so that all emails in your Inbox "folder" are actually bundled up in 1 file called Inbox.dbx, & so on. Additionally, when you choose to save an email to a seperate location on your HDD it bundles the email itself, along with the attachment, all into 1 .eml file.

Right, the individual mail is stored in the .dbx files and you can decide wherever they should be stored. Sampson, I think you saw the temp files.
 
It is a while since I've used it, and my memory isn't what it should be, but I distinctly recall the full Outlook (maybe ver. 4 or 5) to have this functionality. You just rightclicked (or whatever) the attachement and could delete it while keeping the e-mail. Can somebody confirm?
 
H.

Misundertood. The messages are stored in a dbx file. C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\(Registry Key)\Microsoft\Outlook Express\*.dbx. I had understood that attachments much like memo fields in most databases were stored separately as temp files. You would think that you could take out the pointer to the temp without losing the message to the database. Have just never seen this function within Outlook. Will look around.

Found this. Very involved workaround: http://www.mindspring.com/~oe_oh/manually_removing_file_attachmen.htm

Thanks, that does the trick, as long as it doesn't have to be performed often. Still, I find it strange that there's no way of doing this within the program.
 
Anyone know wether Outlook (as opposed to Outlook Express) can do this ?
 
H.

I know Outlook (not OE) can do this. I do it all the time.

Thanks, precisely what I sorta remembered but needed to know !
 
H.