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I’ve never figured out how to force Apple Mail to download ALL attachments. How do I do this? In my experience it never downloads ALL of them and when you’re offline and click on a very old message it will not have the attachment unless you go online.

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You can set this preference by going to the Mail menu > Preferences > Accounts. Select the account you want to adjust on the left, and in the first "Account Information" tab, there should be a pop-up for Download Attachments: [All, Recent, None]. The default for newly added accounts is "Recent".

The preference doesn’t actually do what it says, as mentioned in the original post. Starting with macOS 10.12, it doesn’t always download all the attachments, and even ones that did download (because you viewed the message) may get purged later.

Like the other comment says, this does not work, unfortunately. It’s supposed to work but it does not, and I’ve easily verified this.

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