Deleting old attachments in mac mail

i have multiple email accounts and receive hundreds of emails everyday. a lot of the emails contain attachments which i don't really need to keep. how do i free up space in my hard drive by removing attachments of the emails already in my computer? i've tried highlighting the hundreds of emails and then clicking "remove attachments" but it doesn't seem to work. what's weird is that i start seeing outgoing and incoming mails as pop ups.

I've found that in Mtn Lion (v. 10.8.5 at present) when I search my hard drive for all jpeg files (just one example) a lot of the found items are not in a folder but rather show as being in Mail. While it IS possible to delete the jpeg manually from the hard drive, freeing up many GBs of space, I would prefer not to have them on my hard drive in the first place. Some of these attachments are from POP mailboxes, not IMAP. I do know how to stop the storage with my IMAP accounts, just not with the POP ones.
If I can't stop the POP attachments from being automatically stored, I'd like to be abie to open their location on the hard drive and delete them as a group, rather than one at a time. I'm fairly sure I've read somewhere how to access the innards of an app but for the life of me I can't remember how. I've tried every key-command combination I can think of but nothing takes me to the "folder" in which the attachments are stored. Is this even possible?

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On the mac mail I used to be able to select a mail, then press “Command” button and “M” to delete an attachment (without deleting the whole e-mail, just delete the attachment). But right now, when I try to delete attachments in some e-mails by pressing those two buttons, it just make a “ding” sound and wouldn’t delete anything. Can you please tell me how to solve this problem?
Since this problem only happening with certain e-mails, I thought it’s probably something wrong with the attachment. So, I forward that same e-mail back to me (including the attachment and everything), I can delete that attachment by pressing those two buttons. So, I am guess there is nothing wrong with the file that has been attached.

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I have a new Macbook Air with Moutain Lion. I am using Mac Mail. When I first started, i could add only a few attachments but now I cannot add a single one. This renders Mac Mail almost useless. I've tried adding/deleting accounts, checked all imap options, tried different ISP emails and new user, rebuilt mailbox, and on and on. I thought it might be a file privelage thing, but I don't think so. Drag and drop adds an empty icon.
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Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
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Triple-click the line below to select it, then drag or copy the text — do not type it — into the Terminal window and press return:
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Switching accounts deleted old inbox and sent mail

I switched internet service providers. In Mail I went to Preferences and deleted the old account. I didn't realize this would cause my old e-mails that were still in the inbox and sentmail to disappear. I see that some attachments that came with old message are now in the trash. Is there a way I can recover the old inbox and sentmail contents?
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Before deleting an account in Tiger Mail, the following warning message is provided:
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This is usually ignored or not completely understood but is based on the Mail.app filing structure so now the long winded answer for the reason.
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http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1
The chances generally aren't really good even so, but short of sending your drive to a data recovery service (expensive), such utilities are your only hope.
Note that the more you use your system before you attempt recovery, the more likely it is that the system will overwrite the sections of the drive where the data you want to recover is stored, rendering it unrecoverable by any means. You should therefore stop using the system completely until you get and try to use one of the file recovery tools.
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rickonhismac wrote:
the emails are in inbox of mac mail back to 2009 but when i log in the hotmail.com website they only go back to jan 2012
i think mac mail has erased the from hotmail server after placing them in the mac mail.
i need emails back on hotmail server for access to old emails when working out and about with ipad.
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Sijmons,
well, I didn' got confused but only wanted to help you with your Altzheimer
Geeborg,
I used to .Mac webmail with Firefox on Windows and opened a message with an attachment (mpg). I clicked on the small triangle behind the word "Attachments" and then I clicked on the name of the attachment. This opened a window stating that the attachment would be downloaded. After some time I was asked to open the file with application xyz (I don't remember the name) or to save it on disk. Choosing to open the file finally launched Windows Media Player which played the mpg.
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Deleting old attachments in mac mail

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