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IMAPsize – Defeating Huge Email Attachments

This may sound something like a review of software – in fact it is something like a review. More accurately, this is about how I was reading some emails and was tasked with a question from a colleague that I could easily answer with a “yes” or a “no.” Nothing too interesting about that – I know.

But the thing is, I realized that such tasks of pristine simplicity are way more rare than not. The typical mental errand requires steps and tool initiations, analysis, and then concluding statements well manicured and properly influenced. (Or is that just me?) Emails that are completely satisfied with a two or three word reply are a joy.

The particular email that we’re talking about here needed a quick check up on a fact and then an easy yes or no would have been mine for the taking. The only problem was that the very fact I was seeking was embedded in the body of an email which itself was saddled by a 6 meg attachment. That attachment had long since stopped being relevant to anything important. In many desktop based email clients, whether you connect to your mail server using POP3 or IMAP, you’re going to be waiting impatiently at least a few moments while that email loads its unimportant payload into your cache, just so you can read what was in that message? Man. Not fresh.

Does this ever happen to you? Sometimes you might even just be going through email and accidentally click on one of these messages … you know what I mean if you have folks (aunties, clients, well-meaning huge-photo senders) that slam your inbox with completely unmanageable 10 meg attachments, and then you’re stuck and can’t use your email client while you wait for the download. Not to mention you’re leaving yourself open to attempts by viruses and trojan horses that could be embedded in images (via steganography) that get rendered as email messages are rendered in your email client.

To eliminate this in my email communications, I started using IMAPSize.

IMAPSize is a desktop installed program for email, but it isn’t a program like Outlook, which allows you to read email. This is more like Filezilla, which uses FTP to access a file (or email message in this case) and do a few very crucial things. Being able to select an email with a huge attachment, save the attachment locally, and expunge it from the original email, is one example of such a crucial ability. It does other very fresh stuff, take my word for it.

Using it just now to download a huge attachment without having to wait for the related email to load in my email client, Thunderbird, was a serious relief – and one that I experience often because of IMAPSize.

It’s not beautifully designed.
It’s not web 2.0 (whatever the hell that is…).
It definitely won’t inspire your next great piece of work.

It is, however, an ESSENTIAL tool in the arsenal of a savvy web-based worker that uses email. According to the website, it

is a freeware Windows application that allows you to quickly and efficiently manage your IMAP mail accounts. It is not another mail client. The main purpose of IMAPSize is to locate space consuming folders and allow you to manage them, hence putting your storage quota under control. To accomplish this task IMAPSize offers a variety of useful (and some unique) operations.

Recommended. However, IMAPSize does have it’s technical snafus and bugs. Nothing like crashing your machine, but if your experience is like mine, then you will likely have to restart the app to switch from one domain to another – even though the interface gives you the impression that you can do so without an app restart. At times it chuggs along, but it’s probably more about the speed of your connection and the size of your inbox than it is about IMAPSize itself.