Outlook AttachView

One of the limitations of searching in Outlook is that your search results can't include a separate field that lists the attachments to the email messages. If you need to search through email archives and find & delete attachments of confidential documents produced to your firm without getting rid of the work product in the messages themselves, you can search for them using standard options in Outlook (see the March 5, 2016 tip) and using Kopf's Outlook Attachment Remover as noted in the Tip of the Night for March 18, 2016. However neither Outlook nor this add-in with provide a way of easily logging the attachments you're removing that cross references the messages they were removed from. For defensibility purposes, it's ideal to have a log of exactly what you've deleted.

Nirsoft has a solution and it's called, Outlook AttachView. See this web page, http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/outlook_attachment.html . This another great freeware utility from the Nirsoft people. It installs as a separate application, not an add-in for Outlook. As you can see from the options below it lets you select different Outlook profiles, and specify folders in any one Outlook profile. You can select a specific date range to search in, and limit searches to those from particular authors or recipients, or only messages with a specified string in the subject field.

As you can see from the results below, each attachment gets it own entry, cross referenced with an array of meta data fields in adjacent columns. This meta data can be easily copied out and saved in a spreadsheet.