How do I find an attachment?

"Pete Zahut" dont@bother wrote in message ...
I've got over 3000 mail messages in my OE Inbox, some of them with
attachments. I now need to find a particular message with a Microsoft
Powerpoint attachment, but it's from a couple of years ago and I can't
remember who sent it to me, what date it was, or the subject line - nor can
I remember what the Powerpoint file was called.


I will recognise it when I see it but is there any way I can search by
attachment, ie, do a search for *.pps in the inbox?


Would the sender have referred to the attachment by name in the E-mail?
Then you could search for it in the Message: field because of that
and use the Has attachment flag (Alt-h) to ensure that you found
messages which actually had attachments as well as the other search
criteria.

Or might You have referred to the attachment in a reply E-mail at the same time?
If so you may find the right Subject that way and then be able to find
the original E-mail simply by Subject without resorting to the fact
that it would also have an attachment.


I must stress, the
attachment has not been saved to my hard drive as such, but is still an
attachment to an email - in other words, I did not right-click on the
attachment and select either "Save" or "Save As". It is just a mail message
with a paperclip icon.


One approach to plodding through your whole Inbox would be
to start with a Ctrl-Shift-F Alt-h search. Then sort that by size.

Then, do you have Outlook too? Perhaps it would have better
search functionality in it. If so, you could transfer the E-mails
that you thought would be likely sources for the .pps attachment
and see if you could find it with its tools instead.



Going to Start Search Files and Folders and searching for *.pps only
turns up the 18 files I have in My Documents, not the hundred(s) I have as
mail attachments.


That's because they are contained in OE's Inbox.dbx and not easily
accessible. However, when you do that what search tool do you use--
Search Companion or Windows Search? If the latter WS will index
your E-mails for you, although it appears it still won't recognize attachments
in them, except implied by their size, which it does give.

FWIW I just did a search of my Inbox with WS 4.0 using size as a
criterion to try to expose likely attachment sources with this syntax:

folder:Inbox size:10KB

It seems to have understood what I meant. ; )

Also, if you did get those files exported or saved it's likely that
Windows Search would provide even more possibilities from a search
with its Advanced Query Search (AQS) features. E.g. supposedly
syntax like this should be possible with it in some context:

isattachment:.pps

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro.../advquery.mspx



TIA,

Pete


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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