Reviewed by Shubham Dixit, Independent Expert in Email Forensics and Data File Conversion. Shubham is an external reviewer and not a PCDOTS employee.
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Need the attachments out of your Apple Mail, not the emails, just the files? If it is a handful, Apple Mail already does this for free. If it is years of mail with thousands of attachments scattered across folders, saving them one message at a time is not realistic. Here is the right method for each.
Summary To extract attachments from Apple Mail, select a message and use File then Save Attachments for a few files, free. For a whole mailbox, export it to MBOX, load it into PCDOTS Email Converter on Windows, click Extract then Attachments and every file is pulled out at once.
Two situations, two methods
Pick your situation first, because the easy answer and the bulk answer are completely different jobs.
| What you have | Method | Where |
|---|---|---|
| A few messages with attachments | Save Attachments inside Apple Mail, free | On the Mac |
| A whole mailbox of attachments | Export to MBOX, then bulk extract | Windows PC |
Start with the free option, since for small jobs it is all you need.
The free way: save attachments inside Apple Mail
Apple Mail can save attachments on its own, no software needed. This is perfect for a few messages.
- Open the email that has the attachments in Apple Mail.
- Open the File menu and choose Save Attachments.
- Pick a destination folder and confirm. The files save out as normal documents.
- For one message with several files, this drops them all into your chosen folder at once.
You can also right click an attachment inside a message and save it directly. For a handful of emails, that is the whole job done for free.
Where the free way runs out of road
The built in option works one message at a time. That is fine for 5 emails and miserable for 5000. There is no select the whole mailbox and save every attachment button inside Apple Mail.
So if you need every attachment from years of mail, perhaps to hand a folder of documents to your IT admin or to archive all the files a project ever produced, clicking through messages individually is not a real option. That is the gap the bulk method fills.
“When a case needs every document from a mailbox, saving attachments by hand is where evidence goes missing. Miss one buried message and you have an incomplete set nobody notices until later. A bulk extract from the exported mailbox pulls all of them in one pass, which is the only defensible way to do it at scale.”
Shubham Dixit · Independent Expert, Email Forensics and Data File Conversion
How to extract attachments from a whole mailbox?
Because Apple Mail runs on Mac and the bulk extractor runs on Windows, this is two stages. First export the mailbox to MBOX on the Mac, then pull the attachments on a Windows PC with the PCDOTS Email Converter. The same job also works through the dedicated MBOX Converter.
Stage 1: Export the Apple Mail mailbox to MBOX
On the Mac, select the mailbox in Apple Mail’s sidebar, open the Mailbox menu and choose Export Mailbox. Apple Mail saves it as an .mbox file. Copy that file to your Windows PC.
Stage 1: Exporting the Apple Mail mailbox to MBOX.
Stage 2, step 1: Load the MBOX file
On the Windows PC, open the converter, go to the Open menu, choose MBOX Files and browse to the exported Apple Mail mailbox.
Stage 2: Loading the Apple Mail MBOX file.
Stage 2, step 2: Select the emails
All the Apple Mail messages load with a preview. Select the folders or messages you want attachments from, or pick everything for a full sweep.
Stage 2: Selecting the messages to extract from.
Stage 2, step 3: Click Extract and choose Attachments
Open the Extract menu and select Attachments. The software will pull every attached file out of the selected messages.
Stage 2: Picking Attachments from the Extract menu.
Stage 2, step 4: Set the destination and save
Browse to a save location and click Save. The extraction runs with progress on screen, and when it finishes every attachment sits in your chosen folder as a normal file.
Stage 2: The extracted attachments in the output folder.
The same Extract menu also pulls email addresses and phone numbers separately, the way our Apple Mail email address extraction guide shows, so one pass can hand you both the documents and a contact list.
People also ask
How do I save attachments from a single Apple Mail email?
Open the message, go to the File menu and choose Save Attachments, then pick a folder. Every attachment in that message saves out as a normal file. You can also right click an attachment to save it on its own.
Can I save all Apple Mail attachments at once?
Not from inside Apple Mail, which works one message at a time. To pull attachments from a whole mailbox, export it to MBOX and use a converter’s Extract Attachments option on Windows to get every file in one run.
How do I export an Apple Mail mailbox to MBOX?
Select the mailbox in Apple Mail’s sidebar, open the Mailbox menu and choose Export Mailbox. Apple Mail saves it as a standard .mbox file you can move to a Windows PC for bulk extraction.
Do I need Apple Mail installed for the bulk method?
Only for the export step on the Mac. Once you have the MBOX file, the converter reads it directly on Windows, so the extraction itself does not need Apple Mail at all.
How many attachments can I extract for free?
Apple Mail’s built in Save Attachments is free for any number you do by hand. The converter’s free demo handles 10 emails per folder so you can test the bulk extraction before buying the full edition.
The short version
So extracting attachments from Apple Mail splits cleanly in two. For a few messages, Apple Mail’s own Save Attachments option does it for free with no extra software. For a whole mailbox of files, export to MBOX and let a converter pull every attachment in one pass on Windows. Match the method to the size of the job and you save real time either way.
Are you grabbing files from a few emails, or clearing out a whole mailbox?
