Mail embeds attachments rather than attaching them

My wife has recently acquired a MacBook & we have succesfully migrated her mail from Outlook 2007 on Windows to the Mail program on the Mac. There are niggles though & the biggest is the way that attachments are handled. Any images that are attached to the mail message are not attached as such but are embedded into the text. We have ticked the boxes for Windows friendly attachments but that hasn't helped.

In my view attachments should be just that & the recipient of the mail message should need to click on them to view them especially if there are many attachments. This has been available in every other email client that I have used. Has anyone any ideas on how to achieve what we want?

Cheers

Nigel

Strange as when I email my other account from my Laptop Mac with 10.4.10 and using Mail, if I check my email on my Windows XP laptop the pic is right there in the message. I did nothing to achieve this. What email client you using on the machine checking the email?

I've had the same experience as dtravis7. The images appear to be embedded on the Mac side, but show up as attachments on the PC side and vice-versa. I think this is just how the Mac displays graphics and they are not actually embedded. Nothing of this sort happens when sending a document.

Some further testing reveals that if you attach the image & then right click & select 'View as icon' that it does indeed attach the photo rather than embedding it. When viewed in Gmail or Outlook 2007 the attachments are seen as attachments. If you do not select 'View as icon' then the photos are embedded in the body text of the email. I still think that this is the wrong behaviour but at least we have a workaround now.

I was directed to Mail Attachments Iconizer a plug-in for Mail, which ensures that the attachments are always displayed as icons when a message is opened. This gives exactly the behaviour I was looking for.

http://lokiware.info/Mail-Attachments-Iconizer

nigelbb - thanks for that link! Such a big help since I'm a graphic designer and work for a newspaper.. we get emails from clients that send large pdf files and it takes Mail forever to preview the message because of the file. This will save on the wait time!