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Comment by nousermane | Hacker News Reader

Mutt can do that. Open an email, "v", select attachment to delete, "d". Done.

Works with gmail, too - assuming you've jumped through the necessary hoops to enable full read-write IMAP access to your account.

Edit: Hoops are:

- Gmail Settings > Enable IMAP

- Gmail Settings > Auto-Expunge: off

- Gmail Settings > When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: Immediately delete the message forever

- Gmail Settings > Folder size limits: Do not limit

- Account Settings > Secutiry > Signing in > App password > (create one)

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Yes and you can use rsync instead of Dropbox ($10B)

People are willing to pay for convenience. Your mutt isn’t going to automatically find all large attachment, downsize them or handle inline images, but you didn’t read the article so you wouldn’t know that.

I assume ($10B) is the current Dropbox, Inc. valuation. Is it somehow relevant here?

Yes, that a company with $10B valuation must necessarily have somehow found a market.

It's a reference to an infamous HN comment about how DropBox is trivially replaceable by an invocation of rsync and thus has no market value.

Yes, but the reference is irrelevant because the OP of this thread never said anything about this service having no market value.

What an unnecessarily combative response. The person never claimed that this service has no value; that’s a strawman you constructed. They’re just helpfully pointing out another (free!) way of accomplishing the same thing for those who might want it.

Doesn't this show the complete opposite of what you intended?

Removing attachments is a standard feature of just about any email client, even extremely barebones/cli ones. That was the point. Yet, Gmail is lacks this convenience. Are you seriously arguing that none wants Gmail?

and IT professionals don't use Dropbox for non-trivial use cases. but you wouldn't know that

Does it work for all types of attachments (e.g. inline) and can be done across many emails at once? Can it add information about what was removed?

Yes, for any attachment/mime-section ("inline" is just a flag of "Content-Disposition" header in corresponding mime section).

No, across many emails, at least not without writing some macros.

Sort-of, labeling deleted attachment. You can attach a label to whole email, or edit raw, to edit/replace an attachment with placeholder/label text. A bit fiddly, but doable with some vim-fu.

I've just tried doing this with Mutt. It's quite awkward, but (after fidling with the interface) it did create a new email with an empty attachment, i.e. the attachment is still there, but it has zero bytes. Also, the original email remained within Gmail. So, it seems that Mutt doesn't work well with Gmail for this use case. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the web app Unattach.)

> Also, the original email remained within Gmail.

That's a "feature" of gmail's IMAP server that is easy to confuse for a client bug - see pugio's comment about having exact same problem when using Thunderbird.

Gmail knows nothing about folders (where given email is in exactly one of those), instead using "labels" (which an email can have zero or more of). Problematic "feature" here is that their IMAP interface exposes labels as folders. So, if client asks server to delete message from given folder, instead gmail removes label with that name (then adds "Archive" label, to confuse thing just that little bit more)

Luckily, there is an obscure "When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder" option to rectify this intentional defect.

Huh, anyone know if other clients like mu/mu4e or thunderbird have this capility?

Seems like this is easy enough...

Mu/mu4e: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/23812/remove-attac...

Thunderbird: https://www.datarecovery.institute/remove-attachments-from-t...

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