How to find emails with attachment in Outlook

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Microsoft Office Outlook is an excellent application for checking emails from multiple accounts. With emails, we do get a lot of attachments also. So the next question is, how do you search for any attachment in Outlook?

There are two ways of doing it. One is the inbuilt feature, and another is software that lets you manage and find attachments more cleanly. I used Outlook 2007.

Outlook comes with a predefined set of Search folders, out of which one is Mail with attachments. You can find it under File > New > Search Folder > Select Search Folder > Mail with attachments.

Outlook Search Mail with Attachment
Outlook Search Mail with Attachment

Select this and the Account in which you would like to find attachments. As soon as you hit OK, Outlook gives you results in getting all the emails with attachments. Works Good.

With Attachment Results
With Attachment Results

But we do have one small problem here. Though it lists all the emails with attachments, it doesn’t list the attachment name along with it. So we need to open every mail and then save it. Moreover, I cannot combine two different accounts also. Those are two many steps, and this is where Outlook Attachment View, free software that lists all the attachments from your outlook profile in one go.

List of all attachment in an Outlook Profile
List of all attachments in an Outlook Profile

It works fine if you are concerned about finding an attachment and not the mail. That is why we still need the first method of search, which comes along with Outlook.

Sometimes you remember the mail than the attachment name. If you remember the attachment name, the software can do magic for you, but more Outlook is the right way to remember mail. Moreover, the Outlook attachment view ( the software ) cannot open the mail right from there, so I will eventually have to go back to Outlook to find particular mail.

Both ways are good, but it depends on which situation you are in. I will suggest you keep the Outlook Attachment view handy just in case if you need it.

4 COMMENTS

  1. But is this not a bit laborious, if you have to search every few minutes, for example at work?

    I think it´s better to use a search tool like Lookeen. You only write the word, name, (..) in the search-line and you have your result within under 1 second.

    -Dan-

  2. Wow, just moved from Eudora5.1 (was published in the XXth century) with which searching attachment names was a breeze. And now I understand there is no simple way to do this with Outlook 2007. It’s…stunning.

  3. SUCCESS!!
    Looks like this is addressed but not well documented in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. the “hasattachments:” search criteria is usually said to take yes, no, true, false… but it also takes portions of attachment names, including the extension.
    In the search entry box at the top of outlook enter:
    “received:7/25/2013 hasattachments:xls” ->> returns excel attachments (.xls or .xlsx ) received on that day
    “received:7/25/2013 hasattachments:rep” ->> returns attachments with the “rep” anywhere in the name
    outlook 2013 even highlights that portion of the attachment name
    “received:7/25/2013 hasattachments:(port 06) ->> returns attachments named “CustomReport 062013.xlsx”

    wish this were better documented

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