How to clean up Outlook attachments

If you use Outlook for email on your Mac, it deals with attachments in one of two ways. If you configure it using an IMAP server, attachments are stored on the server until you open them. If you use a POP 3 server, they will be downloaded with the message. Either way, attachments take up room on either your Mac or the email server — which is a big problem if your account has limited storage. 

But of course, there are lots of reasons why you may want to delete attachments and several ways to do it. We’ll cover them all here, listing the methods and also the tools you can use. 

The slow and easy manual method to delete Outlook attachments

Locating attachments outside of Outlook is tricky, so the easiest method is to delete them from within the application. However, this will take quite a while.

1. Launch Outlook.
2. Click on your inbox.
3. In the toolbar, click on the Filter Email tool and choose ‘has attachment.’
4. You should now only see in your inbox those messages that have attachments.
5. Start with the first message, click on it and then click on the arrow next to the attachment.
6. Choose "Remove," then confirm by pressing "Delete" when the dialog box opens.   

The attachment will now be deleted. You can then go through the rest of the messages in your inbox one by one and repeat steps 5 and 6 to delete their attachments. Once you’ve finished deleting attachments from messages in your inbox, you can repeat the process for messages in other folders.

The slightly quicker but more complex method

If you think that it would be much quicker to locate attachments in the Finder and delete them all at once, you’d be right. However, that only works for attachments that have been downloaded. If you use IMAP, that means those that you’ve opened. If you use POP 3, it will be all attachments. 

The problem with locating them in the Finder is that different versions of Outlook store them in different places, so it can get messy quite quickly. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways of identifying where the “Outlook Temp” folder that holds attachments is located. 

Here’s how to delete Outlook attachments:

1. In the Finder, click on the Go menu, and choose Go to Folder > Caches. 

2. Then search for the TemporaryItems folder and the Outlook Temp. Click on it to start looking for attachments. 

How to delete Outlook attachments in older versions of Outlook

Prior to Outlook 2016, attachments were stored in your user Library folder. Here’s how to delete them.

1. Go to the Finder and choose the Go menu.
2. Select Go to Folder.
3. Type “~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/Outlook Temp” 
4. That will take you directly to the folder where attachments are stored. You can now drag them to the Trash and empty them. 

If you have plenty of free space on your Mac or in your email account, you may not need to delete attachments. But, like all temporary files, it’s good practice to get rid of them once in a while. Use the methods described above to identify the folder containing such and get rid of them for good. Keep your Mac clean and healthy!