Delete an attachment from Gmail?
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I got sent a confidential document by accident, but in an email with other documents they are intended for me.
Is there a way to delete an attachment from Gmail without deleting the entire email, or other attachments to that email?
I'm not finding anything in their UI, but it is obtuse as shit. Maybe it can be done via. IMAP clients?
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I believe attachments are universally treated as an inherent part of the email they were attached to. You can't delete one without deleting the message in any email system I've ever used.
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@masonwheeler Eh. Outlook/Exchange lets you do it (right-click the attachment and select Remove Attachment)
@blakeyrat Don't think it's possible in GMail without deleting the whole message, so you may want to forward it to yourself, removing the unintended attachment in the forward, and then delete the original.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@blakeyrat Don't think it's possible in GMail without deleting the whole message, so you may want to forward it to yourself, removing the unintended attachment in the forward, and then delete the original.
I just tested this. It works.
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Maybe it can be done via. IMAP clients?
IIRC IMAP is literally the only way, aside from really hacky API calls (and I think even that was deprecated).
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@masonwheeler said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I believe attachments are universally treated as an inherent part of the email they were attached to. You can't delete one without deleting the message in any email system I've ever used.
You've never used Outlook? I find that hard to believe.
@e4tmyl33t said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@blakeyrat Don't think it's possible in GMail without deleting the whole message, so you may want to forward it to yourself, removing the unintended attachment in the forward, and then delete the original.
I found someone who came up with IMAP suggestion doing basically that-- apparently Thunderbird lets you re-add an email to the IMAP database without actually having to send it to yourself. So you detach the mail, delete it from Gmail's interface, edit the mail to delete the attachment, then you can re-attach the mail to the IMAP account.
It's also possible Outlook's "Remove Attachment" feature works over IMAP and not just Exchange's MAPI protocol, but I don't want to sync a work computer to a home email account to try that out.
Still, you'd think "accidentally getting someone else's personal document" would be a scenario the Gmail team imagined happened at some point. But that would require some level of competence from Google, I suppose...
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@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I just tested this. It works.
Won't that fuck up the conversation threading?
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@masonwheeler said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I believe attachments are universally treated as an inherent part of the email they were attached to. You can't delete one without deleting the message in any email system I've ever used.
You've never used Outlook? I find that hard to believe.
Outlook lets you edit an email you received to make it look like the sender called you a diaper baby poopy head.
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@anotherusername Yeah. Are you trying to make some kind of point?
Once the email's in your database, it's yours to do with as you please. It's not some kind of holy artifact, editing of which will bring armageddeon down upon us.
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Still, you'd think "accidentally getting someone else's personal document" would be a scenario the Gmail team imagined happened at some point. But that would require some level of competence from Google, I suppose...
The assumption is that the reception of said document would implicitly mean the email as a whole was not intended for you, and the solution is to delete it outright.
It's not very often I get an email I want with an attachment I don't...
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@e4tmyl33t said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@masonwheeler Eh. Outlook/Exchange lets you do it (right-click the attachment and select Remove Attachment)
Huh. TIL. I've been using Outlook for years, but never noticed that feature. :P
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@anotherusername Yeah. Are you trying to make some kind of point?
Yes, sorry. The point was that Outlook lets you do bizarre shit like change something that someone else wrote so it says something else, and still attributes it to them (I seem to remember this being a trigger of yours). "Outlook lets you do it" is hardly indicative of what a sane email client should do.
@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Once the email's in your database, it's yours to do with as you please.
It makes it trivially easy to, say, produce an email where my boss told me I'm getting a $5/hr raise. I think the IT department should be able to come up with the "real" email, at least, if I tried it.
At least with a forwarded email, everyone knows that the quoted message is not the original and you could've easily just typed something different there.
@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
It's not some kind of holy artifact, editing of which will bring armageddeon down upon us.
At the very least there should be a cryptographic signature that becomes invalid if the email's edited.
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@anotherusername I mean, yes, but IMAP allows that too, and IMAP will even sync the changes back up to the server (I don't think MAPI will, but I could be wrong...). So.
Demonstrably it's not a huge issue, or the feature would have been removed by someone before now.
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@blakeyrat anyway, the fact that Outlook lets you remove attachments is related to the fact that it lets you edit the email in general (attachments are part of the email; removing attachments from it changes it). Gmail, AFAIK, doesn't let you, at least not from the web client (I don't know if it would let you modify the email on Gmails server with an IMAP client or not).
You can also add attachments in Outlook. Basically, once you click "edit" you're in compose mode, and you can do anything at all to it. And it's not superficially obvious that it's been edited, once you save it.
Now, in general, removing attachments can be used to manage your mailbox space (removing attachments usually makes the message a whole lot smaller). But letting you edit emails willy nilly with no restraints whatsoever is kind of a .
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I think the most obvious solution here is to just ask the sender to re-send the email without that attachment, and then delete the first email. If you can't do that (because raisins), then forwarding it to yourself without the attachment and deleting the original is the next best, I think. (Gmail does let you delete one email from a conversation; it's in the menu.)
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@blakeyrat Forward to yourself, remove attachment, delete original email?
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I just tested this. It works.
Won't that fuck up the conversation threading?
I'll try it with a thread, see what happens.
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I just tested this. It works.
Won't that fuck up the conversation threading?
Here's what I got. YMMV.
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@xaade it won't fuck up the conversation threading; just delete the original message from the conversation thread. It's in the arrow menu next to ď„’.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@xaade it won't fuck up the conversation threading; just delete the original message from the conversation thread. It's in the arrow menu next to ď„’.
Depends on what you consider, "fuck up".
The original message and the forward appear in the same thread.
However, the forward has it coming from you to you, of course.
But that's the best I can get from gmail's web.
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@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
The original message and the forward appear in the same thread.
I mean, you delete the original message from the thread. Then you just have the forward.
@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
However, the forward has it coming from you to you, of course.
Of course. Can't help that. The original sender would need to resend it without the sensitive attachment if you wanted to fix that.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
I mean, you delete the original message from the thread. Then you just have the forward.
You misunderstand.
The only time threading would matter is if there's a previous message you kept before the one you intend to delete. That one remains in the thread.
So, in the case of "original" "reply with attachment" "forward without attachment", the reply with attachment is deleted, and the original remains in the thread.
Just, look at the screenshot.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Of course. Can't help that. The original sender would need to resend it without the sensitive attachment if you wanted to fix that.
It may well be worth the trouble, if one really wants to solve the actual problem.
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@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
The only time threading would matter is if there's a previous message you kept before the one you intend to delete
Or after it. It might be addressed to other people, some of whom replied using "reply all".
Regardless, I'm fairly certain it wouldn't matter and that the conversation thread would still be a conversation thread if you deleted the original message in it. It just wouldn't have that original message.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Regardless, I'm fairly certain it wouldn't matter and that the conversation thread would still be a conversation thread if you deleted the original message in it. It just wouldn't have that original message.
Yes, that is the case.
@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Or after it. It might be addressed to other people, some of whom replied using "reply all".
Hmm... good question. I'm not certain what a reply all would do, whether it would attach to the original thread.
But see, this is the other side of this problem, the attachments would continue to be reintroduced with the replies.
EDIT:
Ok, I tested that. The reply shows up after the forwarded message, but doesn't contain the 2 attachments.
So at least from gmail to gmail, it doesn't seem to be a problem.
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@xaade said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
But see, this is the other side of this problem, the attachments would continue to be reintroduced with the replies.
No. The default when replying is that the original attachments aren't included. It wouldn't make any sense to include them (everyone to whom you're replying should already have them).
When you forward a message, the default is typically to include attachments, but there's typically an option to forward it without them. Or you can remove the attachments before sending the forward.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Yes, sorry. The point was that Outlook lets you do bizarre shit like change something that someone else wrote so it says something else, and still attributes it to them (I seem to remember this being a trigger of yours). "Outlook lets you do it" is hardly indicative of what a sane email client should do.
Even if Outlook didn't let you do that, you'd still be able to do it by editing the PST, by editing your SQLite database in the case of Thunderbird, by editing your mbox file directly on the IMAP server... e-mail's not secure, get over it.
Or get an e-mail signing certificate; they're like $20.
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@heterodox said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
e-mail's not secure, get over it
That's no excuse for going out of your way to make it even less so.
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@blakeyrat said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@anotherusername I mean, yes, but IMAP allows that too
No it doesn’t. You can upload a new, similar message and remove the old one, but it doesn’t provide a way to change the content of the original.
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@greybeard what distinguishes the original message from a new, similar message?
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@anotherusername Different protocol-level identifiers. In IMAP, once the server tells the client something about the content of a message, that information can’t change. Though the server does have a way to invalidate the client’s cache for the entire folder.
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@greybeard so each message has a unique message ID. Great. Is it exposed anywhere? Headers even?
If Bob sends Sue an email, and later on Sue files a grievance over it, and the archived copy of the email that she prints out to use as evidence is different from the copy that Bob prints out from his "Sent" folder, how difficult is it to tell which one of them "edited" their copy, or if they both did?
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@greybeard so each message has a unique message ID. Great.
IMAP has two identifiers: one the sequence number within the folder, the other a retrofit providing uniqueness only within the folder.
Is it exposed anywhere? Headers even?
Not usually.
how difficult is it to tell which one of them "edited" their copy, or if they both did?
How difficult is it to tell which one modified their copy on the way from the server to the printer?
Email isn't particularly secure. Unless there's some sort of cryptographic signature over the content, you're down to forensic examination of logs.
And the copy first put in the sent folder doesn't necessarily have to have ever been the same as what was sent to the recipients.
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@greybeard said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
How difficult is it to tell which one modified their copy on the way from the server to the printer?
That's easy; then you just have IT check the email that's on the server.
Email isn't particularly secure. Unless there's some sort of cryptographic signature over the content, you're down to forensic examination of logs.
Yeah, I guess IT would probably have to check the log of every email that's ever been sent to find the original version of that email. Which hopefully wouldn't be too difficult.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@greybeard so each message has a unique message ID. Great. Is it exposed anywhere? Headers even?
If Bob sends Sue an email, and later on Sue files a grievance over it, and the archived copy of the email that she prints out to use as evidence is different from the copy that Bob prints out from his "Sent" folder, how difficult is it to tell which one of them "edited" their copy, or if they both did?
Bob shouldn't have called Sue a cunt in his e-mail. Then there wouldn't be that problem.
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@el_heffe said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
@greybeard so each message has a unique message ID. Great. Is it exposed anywhere? Headers even?
If Bob sends Sue an email, and later on Sue files a grievance over it, and the archived copy of the email that she prints out to use as evidence is different from the copy that Bob prints out from his "Sent" folder, how difficult is it to tell which one of them "edited" their copy, or if they both did?
Bob shouldn't have called Sue a cunt in his e-mail. Then there wouldn't be that problem.
Maybe he didn't. Maybe Sue edited that in to Bob's email because she can't stand Bob and she wanted to get him fired.
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@anotherusername said in Delete an attachment from Gmail?:
Maybe he didn't. Maybe Sue edited that in to Bob's email because she can't stand Bob and she wanted to get him fired.
In that case, Bob was right. Sue is a cunt.