3 Epic Ways To Extract Attachments From Outlook That You Haven’t Tried

Receiving several emails with multiple attachments becomes tedious when we have to save them one after the other. Yet, some simple hacks exist to extract attachments from Outlook emails at once.

Sending and receiving files through email is the most convenient way to share data files with other users. This makes the email tray permanent file storage and after some time it results in exceeded storage space issues. So, my question is do you often exchange data files with your clients or partners using Outlook? Does your correspondence include multiple attachments?
If your answer to these questions is Yes, then you also might think about optimizing the storage of your data files because these heavy attachments are making your Outlook sluggish. In this technical guide, we’re going to disclose some simple techniques to extract attachments from Outlook folder a single attempt.

#1. Expert Approach to Extract Outlook Attachments in Batch

Outlook Attachment Extractor is a professional way to extract attachments from multiple emails Outlook 2019 / 2016 / 2013 / 2010 / 2007 and below versions in bulk mode. Using this one can extract attachments from multiple Outlook emails even without disturbing the original folder hierarchy of emails. Below is how to extract attachments from PST file without Outlook:

• First of all, download the tool and launch it. Click on Open tab and add the Outlook PST from which you want to extract the attachments

• The tool will load all added PST file and provide you three different options to maintain the folder hierarchy:
  1. Folder Hierarchy: This option will retain the original hierarchy of browsed PST
  2. Folder Hierarchy (Subject Wise): This option will manage the resultant attachments as per their email subjects
  3. No Folder Hierarchy: This option will save the output attachments in a single folder without maintaining any structure
• Choose the appropriate folder hierarchy option as per your current requirements and browse a destination location to save the resultant data files Click Extract to extract attachments from Outlook PST file

• Extract Outlook attachments process will begin right after this and the status of the on-going process will be displayed by the software along with item count

• Once the process gets completed, you can access all the Outlook attachments from a single location and delete the unnecessary emails to enhance the performance of your Outlook application.

#2. Extract Attachments From Outlook Inbox

Microsoft Outlook provides an option to extract and save all the attachments from a single Outlook email. Below is how you can save multiple attachments from Outlook:

• Launch Outlook application and open a specific email that comprises multiple attachments
• Select and hit a right-click on an attachment. Select Save All Attachments option

• Hit the OK button and browse a destination location for output attachments. Click OK

#3. Use Rule To Extract Attachments From Outlook Folder

• Launch VBA IDE in Microsoft Outlook via pressing Alt+F11 keys to extract attachments from multiple Outlook emails

• In the left side of screen, expand the screen until you get Modules section and enter the following code in the Modules section

• Paste the following script in main VBA window

Public Sub saveAttachtoDisk (itm As Outlook.MailItem)
Dim objAtt As Outlook.Attachment
Dim saveFolder As String
saveFolder = "c:\temp\"
For Each objAtt In itm.Attachments
objAtt.SaveAsFile saveFolder & "\" & objAtt.DisplayName
Set objAtt = Nothing
Next
End Sub

• Quit VBA IDE window so that you can extract attachments from multiple emails Outlook 2016
• Now, you need to create a Rule that will call this script. For this, click on Tools >> Rules and Alerts >> New Rule…

• In new wizard, click on ‘Check messages when they arrive’ option to resolve how to extract attachments from outlook in multiple emails issue
• You can define the criteria that the messages must watch. Use ‘with specific words in the message header’ and ‘.txt’ option to search the string for saving text files only
• Choose ‘run a script’ and click on ‘script’

• Hit the Finish button. Send a new email with multiple attachments to your Outlook account and check if the rule is working to extract attachments from multiple emails Outlook 2010

Receiving two or more emails with same file name can overwrite the previous one. You can use the following code with ‘dim’ to prevent this situation:

Dim dateFormat
dateFormat = Format(Now, "yyyy-mm-dd H-mm")

After that, replace ‘objAtt.SaveAsFile‘ with following code line:

objAtt.SaveAsFile saveFolder & "\" & dateFormat & objAtt.DisplayName

In order to extract attachments from Outlook inbox to a certain folder type, use following code within ‘For Each’ loop rather than above code:

if InStr(objAtt.DisplayName, '.xml') Then
objAtt.SaveAsFile saveFolder & "\" & objAtt.DisplayName
end if

Wrapping Things Up!

How to extract attachments from Outlook in multiple emails? This is a very common question searched by several MS Outlook users on a daily basis. Considering this, we’ve come up with this write up. Here, we’ve talked about different methods to extract attachments from Outlook emails in a single go. So, from now extracting attachments from Outlook application will be no more a complex task for users.