workarounds for reply with attachment

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Hello,

We have just migrated from Lotus Notes to Outlook 2003 + Exchange
2003, and I just need a small sanity check.

In Lotus Notes, when you replied a mail with attachment, by default it
replied with the attachment included.
Personally I consider this a Bad Thing(tm), but bad habits die hard
and people over here seem to rely on it.

I did my homework and researched some workarounds:

* Don't use Reply, but use Forward, and manually copy/paste the
receipients from the original mail.
--> This is what I currently recommend to our users. They don't like
it but it works.

* Reply with original email included (can be set in Tools --> Options
--> ...)
--> The complete mail is an attachment. Personally I find this
interesting for archival purposes (it preserves the complete mail
headers including mail routing information) but I can imagine that
users won't like it as their default reply style.

* Write some VBA code to create a custom "Reply with attachment". I
saw example code on Sue Mosher's site.
--> Interesting, but adds complexity to Outlook deployment. They would
like to keep Outlook as default as possible over here.

* Third party apps. Not yet investigated, but I suppose they come down
to Sue's VBA code.
--> Same concerns as with the previous solution. A cost might be
involved.

* Don't send attachments, but put files on Sharepoint and send the
links.
--> A radically different way of working. Will only work for internal
mailflow, not for mails received from the outside world.


Are there any other workarounds that I didn't think about?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

No, I think you've done your homework.
Of course there is also the Reply button and then manually reattaching the
document in question. This can be as easy as drag & drop from the original
mail into the new mail. This will also prevent needles attachments when
people just press Reply and don't even consider about removing the
attachment when needed. In most cases you don't have to reply with the
attachment as it is implied that the original sender still has it.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Are there any other workarounds that I didn't think about?

Reply and then drag the attachment from the original message to the reply.

This begs the question, though: since the sender already has the attachment,
why would you want to send it back in a reply?

 

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Reply and then drag the attachment from the original message to the reply.

This begs the question, though: since the sender already has the attachment,
why would you want to send it back in a reply?

Don't ask... "they" are coming from Notes... that explains
everything!