Apart from the fact that my outlook pst file is almost to the point where it needs a hard drive all of its own, I thought it was about time that I sorted out my email folders.
I’m usually pretty pedantic about organising my emails into folders depending on who, what or where the message came from, but one thing I have never done is save the attachments off to a specific folder based for each email.
Over time, this has led to an massive increase in the size of the outlook pst file(s) that I use.

It has never really been a problem though, since I also tend to archive my emails quite often to try and keep the size of the pst files down. I even have rules to create individual archives.

More recently I have enabled cron jobs to email me the logs on sites that I maintain. Each time I receive an email with a log attached, I have to manually save the attachment into a folder so I can then run my analysis tools on it. I suppose I could have spent the time and developed a script or utility to do it myself, but I googled to see if there was anything out there and I found quite a few. All were reasonably priced (between £10 and £20s so I didn’t really see the point in spending my time to develope one of my own.

The one that I decided to try happened to have a trial period of 30 days, but it took me 20mins of using it to decide I wanted to purchase the registered copy.

EZDetach is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that makes saving and categorizing attachments as easy as a mouse click – you don’t even have to open the messages. It is a perfect Outlook companion for people who receive email attachments.


  • Easily extract / save Outlook attachments from one or multiple messages.
  • Save email attachments as individual files.
  • Organize attachments in file system folders for easy access and sharing.
  • Delete attachments.
  • Print attachments.
  • Regain access to attachments blocked by Outlook as unsafe.
  • Automatically save attachments with Outlook Rules Wizard.
  • Reduce mailbox size.
  • Process attachments with custom scripts.
  • And a lot more…

The company is called TechHit and you can find more details on EXDetach at their website: http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/

Not only can I now filter the emails from the site servers in to their own folder, the rule also performs a custom action which invokes EXDetach and saves each attachment in to a specific folder. The rule even executes my analysis tools and creates my reports for me. And the whole process is now automated (which gives me more time to write yet more useless info in my blog).

To be slightly impartial, I did also find a production from Sperry Software, (Attachment Save), but they didn’t have a trial period or a demo version (or at least I could not find one on their site), and I don’t like not being able to "try before I buy" even if they have a money back guarentee. So they dipped out this time and I went ahead and got the EZDetach. It does exactly what I needed the utility to do, and probably more.