trouble viewing attachments

October 28, 2021 10:42 AM

Person A sends an email to me (and the group) with an attachment. I read the email, view the attachment no problem.

Then person B responds to the original email. I can read that response, but the attachment is nowhere to be found. I would like to be able see the attachment(s) on the email thread until I decided to either save the thread or delete. What am I doing wrong?

posted by jtexman1 to Technology (6 answers total)

Hi - I don't think you're doing anything wrong, it's Outlook.

You can read the attachment fine when Person A sent it out to you and the group. But when Person B REPLIED to that email, Outlook took the attachment off, because that's just what it does. The attachment is still on the original email Person A sent you, elsewhere in your inbox.

The only way for Person B to reply to that email with the attachment still attached is for them to FORWARD the email back to the group instead of REPLYING. And again, that's just how Outlook does things.

But I feel you; I wish Outlook wouldn't do that either.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Sorry to sit, This is Gmail.
posted by jtexman1 at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

The attachment should be attached to the original email, not the reply (attachments don't usually keep getting reattached and resent with every reply).

Different email client apps/websites display threads and attachments different. If this is Gmail on the web, it sometimes collapses older messages you've already read in a thread. If you open the thread and scroll to the top of it, you should be able to click on the topmost message to expand it, and the attachment will be in that message like it was before.
posted by zachlipton at 10:49 AM on October 28, 2021 [7 favorites]

Using GMail in thread view, click on the original email to see the attachment. It makes no sense to send the same attachment everytime someone responds unless the person responding made changes to the attachment. It would take up way too much space on Google's servers. If someone makes a change and then reattaches the file, it will appear on that email.
posted by AugustWest at 10:52 AM on October 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

Threaded email is a broken concept, because attachments only live on the original message. You're asking gmail to do something it can't.
posted by scruss at 2:56 PM on October 28, 2021

Folks have captured it above but I wanted to add, the "thread" is just a useful bin that Gmail has put all these emails it thinks are related into. It's not a single entity, but rather a collection. You have to go through the bin to find the file with the attachment.

They could do it differently, show all the attachments associated with any email in the thread, but then you'd have confusion anytime people are sending revisions back and forth, trying to find the latest one and figure out which one which person is referring to.
posted by Lady Li at 12:54 AM on November 7, 2021