How to delete (strip) attachments in Horde Webmail

Last updated February 26th, 2016 at 09:13 am

If you use Webmail, it’s easy to accumulate lots of storage on your mailserver, especially if you’re a pack rat and tend not to delete messages. This is particularly true when messages include fat attachments (e.g., videos; high-resolution images). When your email account accumulates lots of storage, this can put your hosting account over its disk space quota, leading either to shutdown or increased costs.

Several of our clients have a number of email accounts which are accesssed via the Horde Webmail interface. In the case of at least one of those clients, many of those email accounts are indeed storing messages with those fat attachments.

I suggested he tell his people to download those attachments to their computers and then delete the attachments. He asked me how to delete the attachments. When I fired up one of my many email accounts in Horde, I was surprised/disappointed to learn that the function for deleting (or, as Horde calls it, "stripping") attachments is not enabled by default.

This article shows you how to enable the deletion/stripping of attachments in Horde Webmail.

Your Message Viewing options might already be set to allow stripping of attachments. If so, you’ll see trash icons like these…

…and all you have to do is click either the Strip Attachement or Strip All Attachments icon.

If your Horde system is not set up to enable attachment stripping, here’s all you have to do:

Step 1: Access Options:

Step 2: Select Options for Mail:

Click the drop-down box and select Mail:

Step 3: Select Message Viewing Options:

Step 4: Tick the "Show an icon…" box:

Step 5: Stip attachment or attachments:

(This assumes you’ve already DOWNLOADED any attachments you want to keep.)

This is what your message will look like after stripping attachments:

Voila!