Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions related to the Attachment Manager product.

Q: [Can someone access my attachments stored in the Cloud?]
A: No. All communication with Amazon S3 is authenticated with your AWS Secret Key. By default, your bucket and all attachments you upload there are readable/writable by you only. If you use the optional encryption feature in the Enterprise edition, even Amazon would not be able to read your files. Furthermore, if you use the optional "random password on each attachment" feature, no one can guess all passwords. The passwords are stored with the email message and, since only you (and your Exchange Admin) have access to your outlook mailbox, only you have access to the passwords.

Q: [If I detach embedded images to Amazon S3, can someone guess the URL and see the image?]
A: No. Embedded images are converted to a URL to be readable directly from your message. When stored in S3, the URL contains the image name, as well as a hash computed using your AWS Secret Key, which serves as the authentication mechanism with Amazon. Unless someone gets a hold of your AWS Secret Key, they will not have access to your files. Furthermore, all images are viewed through HTTPS, so no one can snoop in the middle.

Q: [I do not have or want to apply for an Amazon S3 account, and I do not have a network drive either, can I still use your product?]
A: Yes. Enable Network Drive option, and in the "ND path" box, enter a local path, such as "c:\attachmentarchive". This is the permanent storage location for attachments, so make sure it is backed up periodically. Note that your local cache can be on the same drive (e.g., "c:"), but it has to be in a different directory, e.g., "c:\localcache".

Q: [What happens after the 30 days evaluation?]
A: During the 30 days evaluation, you can detach up to 300 email messages, but you can re-attach an unlimited number of messages. After 30 days, you will no longer be able to detach or reattach any messages. So make sure that you reattach all attachments before the evaluation ends. You will be reminded about the remaining evaluation days whenever you start Outlook.

After 30 days, if you still have detached attachments, you have three options:

You can still view the attachments stored in the Cloud. The attachments are stored under a subdirectory whose name includes the email sent date, the sender's name and the subject.
If the attachments are still in the cache directory, you can still click the attachments and view them as normal. If you move to a different machine, you can manually copy over the cache directory to the new machine and the attachments should still be viewable.
Purchase a valid license which will allow you to reattach all attachments.

Q: [How do I know if an email is converted?]
A: There are several ways to tell.

If there are regular attachments, you should see the attachment names are changed to have a 3 letter prefix. For example, if the attachment is called "readme.txt", you will see S3_readme.txt or ND_readme.txt, depending on the service enabled.
If the attachments are all embedded images, you can right click on the message, then click "view source", then press ctrl-F and search for "img". Before conversion, you should see tags such as "<img src="cid:.....". After conversion, you should see tags such as "<img src="https://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/....." or "<img src="file://......".
Sort the folder based on the size, if the email is too big, e.g., more than 100KB, it is most likely that it still has the original attachments.

You can always click "detach" and "reattach" multiple times.

Q: [Outlook says "Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet". What do I do?]
A:

Go to Tools->Options->Security->Change Automatic Download Settings, make sure the checkbox "Permit downloads from Web sites in this security zone: Trusted Zone" is checked
Go to Tools->Options->Security->Zone Settings, click "Trusted sites", click "sites", then add [bucket].s3.amazonaws.com to the trusted sites zone. [bucket] is the bucket name you used to store attachments. Unless you enabled otherwise, only you have access to this bucket, so you can fully trust this site.

Q: [The cache directory fills up fast and I am running out of disk space, what do I do?]
A: Feel free to delete any file in the cache directory. Your attachments are safely stored in the Cloud. The cache directory is only there to improve performance and allow offline access. We currently do not do any cache disk management, so you must manually delete cache files to clear up space.

Q: [When I forward, reply or reply-to-all a converted email, my recipient could not see the embedded images. Why?]
A: When forwarding, all regular attachments are automatically re-attached. However, all embedded images remain to be a link, i.e., a URL. If you used S3, your recipient can either manually download the image by right clicking on the image, or add [yourbucket].s3.amazonaws.com (or s3.amazonaws.com, not recommended though) to his/her trusted zone. If you used a network drive, your recipient cannot see the image because he/she does not have access to your network drive. If you want the images to be embedded, first re-attach all attachments on the original email, then forward, reply and reply-to-all.

Q: [After conversion, I have extra attachments lists, and the embedded images are not showing. Is this normal?]
A: Yes. We changed the attachments, and Outlook needs to refresh its display. The easiest way is first move to display a different item, then click back to the original item. The display will be updated.

Q: [After deleting an email permanently, e.g., by pressing shift-delete, the attachments are still stored in the Cloud. Why?]
A: It is a well known Limitation of Outlook that there is not a reliable way for Add-in programs, like ours, to be notified of permanent deletes. If you permanently delete an email, you delete the associated attachment link to the Cloud, but you have not deleted the actual attachment stored in the Cloud. To make sure you delete the attachments, please use the "Permanent Delete" button instead.

Note that if you hit "Delete" key in folders other than the "Deleted Items" folder, the item is simply moved to the "Deleted items" folder. Since the item is not deleted (yet), you do not need to worry about the attachments.

In the next release, we will also provide a tool to help clean up in case your forgot to use the "Permanent Delete" button. The tool is a utility program that scans through all your emails to detect and delete any attachment that is not linked to by any email. You can run this utility periodically (e.g., monthly) to clean up

Q: [I selected "compression" and "encryption" in the Options menu, but why my embedded images are not compressed and encrypted?]
A: Embedded images are never compressed or encrypted because they need to be viewable as a URL.

Q: [When I click on an attachment for the first time, why it takes a while to load?]
A: If the attachment was not cached locally, Attachment Manager is attempting to download it first before allowing you to open it. Depending on the size of the attachment and your network connection, this may take some time. You can always click "Cache" button to cache the attachments ahead of time.

Q: [If I changed and saved an attachment, will it automatically propagate the changes to the Cloud?]
A: No. You only changed the local cached copy. To also change the copy on the Cloud, first re-attach the attachments, change it, then detach to Cloud again.

Q: [My outlook hangs during conversion, what do I do?]
A: If you detach a large attachment and if your network connection is slow, or if you are detaching a large number of emails, Outlook appears to hang while uploading the attachments to S3. This is normal. Please wait for it to finish. Only as a last resort should you kill and restart the Outlook process.

Q: [I have an Outlook meeting invite with embedded images, but even after I click Detach, the image is still there. The email size does not reduce. Why?]
A: Some embedded images, particularly those in a calendar invite, are embedded using the OLE container technology. We do not have visibility into what is stored inside the container. If we detach it, the image will not display properly. We are currently looking into ways to convert and detach these special attachments. Luckily, these attachments are very rare.

Q: [I have an email with embedded images, but even after I click Detach, the image is still there. The email size does not reduce. Why?]
A: If the email is written in the RTF format, the embedded images are part of the document and we cannot see them. Therefore, we cannot detach them and store them in the Cloud. If you have a lot of images in your RTF message, you could convert the message to HTML format, and then the images are visible. Note that regular attachments in RTF still work the same way as those in HTML messages.

Q: [I have an email with another email attached. Even after I click Detach, the attached email is still there. Why?]
A: Outlook treats attached emails as Embedded items. It behaves differently from a regular attachment. We currently do not support embedded items. This limitation will likely be removed in future versions.

Q: [Is the attachment size shown correct?]
A: After the attachments have been detached to the Cloud, Outlook may not show the correct original file size. This is because the attachment has been converted to a link which is only 4KB in size. To find out the original file size, check the file stored in the Cloud, or re-attach the attachment to find the actual size.