Previewing and saving attachments

People use email to send you documents and photos. Here's how to work with them. When you receive a message with an attachment, you will know because to see a little paperclip right here. When you click on the message, you can see what's attached. Click on the Preview button to see a sample of the actual document. Note that this is a Quick Look Preview, one of the features of the Macintosh operating system. So you can also see the preview by simply clicking once on the attachment then pressing the Spacebar. Press the Spacebar again to close the window. To open the attachment, double click on it.

If it's a PDF or a picture, your Mac's preview program will open. If you have the original program it was created in, for example Microsoft Word, that program will open. To save the message without opening it, go up to the Message menu, hover over Attachments, and choose Save. Note this little blue down arrow. When you click on it, it gives you the ability to save anywhere on your computer. I will go ahead and save it. If you want to keep the email message but not the attachment, you can also go back up to the Attachments menu and choose Remove.

You can also get to any of those options by right-clicking or Control- clicking on the attachment. That will pop up a context sensitive menu and you can open, save, preview or remove the attachment this way too. If the email has multiple attachments, use Save All and Preview All to perform the actions on all of the attachments at once. Occasionally, you may get a message where all the pictures are in line in the message instead of included as attachments. When that happen right click on the message and you can save it as normal.

Sending attachments is one of the most useful purposes for email and Outlook manages it very well.