Find a mail attachment on a Mac
· 5 min read
An attachment you remember receiving is in one of three places: still inside the message in Mail, in Mail’s own download folder if you ever opened or previewed it, or wherever you saved it deliberately. Mail’s search and filter find the first; Finder finds the second and third once you know which folders to look in. Spotlight does not show attachments as files, which is why searching for the filename from the menu bar so often comes up empty.
Search inside Mail first
Mail’s search is better than most people give it credit for, and it is the only tool that knows which message an attachment belongs to.
- Open Mail and click the search field at the top right of the window.
- Type a word from the attachment’s name, or the sender’s name. As you type, Mail suggests matches grouped by people, subjects and attachments; pick the attachment suggestion if one appears.
- Check the scope buttons that appear under the search field. All searches every mailbox; the other button restricts the search to the mailbox you had selected.
If you cannot remember a name at all, filter instead of searching. Click the filter button at the top of the message list, then click the filter description that appears and choose Only Mail with Attachments. Combine that with a sort: View, Sort By, Attachments puts every message with an attachment together, and sorting by Date within that narrows things quickly.
Once you have the message, the attachment is at the bottom of it. Drag it to the Desktop, right-click it and choose Save Attachment, or use File, Save Attachments to save everything in the message at once.
The folder where opened attachments quietly collect
Every time you double-click an attachment in Mail, or press Space to Quick Look it, Mail writes a copy to a folder of its own:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail Downloads
To open it, switch to Finder, press Shift-Cmd-G, paste the path and press Return. Inside you will find one subfolder per attachment you have ever opened, with the original filename intact.
This folder is the answer to a specific puzzle: you opened a PDF from Mail last week, edited it, and now cannot find where it went. It went here, and the edited version is probably sitting in one of these subfolders. It is also why this folder grows over time. Everything in it is a copy; the attachment itself stays in the message, so deleting the contents of Mail Downloads loses nothing.
Finder’s normal search does not look here, because the folder is inside your Library. To include it, press Cmd-F in Finder, click the plus button, add a System files criterion and set it to are included.
Where Mail actually keeps attachments
Mail stores every message and its attachments in ~/Library/Mail, inside a folder named V followed by a number that changes with the macOS version. Below that are folders for each account, named with long identifiers, then a folder per mailbox ending in .mbox, then the messages themselves alongside their attachments.
You can look, but do not move, rename or delete anything in there. Mail treats the folder as its database, and it will rebuild a mailbox, or lose track of messages, if the contents change underneath it. If you want a file out, get it from the message in Mail.
Two things decide whether an attachment is on disk at all. First, the account setting: Mail, Settings, Accounts, choose the account, and under Account Information look for Download Attachments. Set to All, every attachment is fetched and stored; set to Recent or None, older attachments live only on the mail server until you open the message. Second, Spotlight: it indexes messages so that Mail search works, but it does not present the attachment files inside the store as separate results, and Finder search skips the folder along with the rest of your Library.
Searching the store from Terminal
If you have Full Disk Access granted to Terminal, find can walk the Mail store directly:
find ~/Library/Mail -iname "*contract*" 2>/dev/null
Without Full Disk Access, Terminal reports “Operation not permitted” for that folder and finds nothing. Full Disk Access on a Mac explains what the grant covers and how to give it to one app for a task and remove it afterwards. This approach is thorough and slow, and it returns paths deep in the store rather than a message you can reply to; it is the right tool when you know the filename and want the bytes, not the conversation.
A search app that treats attachments as files
Everywhere catalogs every filename on the Mac once, including the files inside the Mail store, and then answers as you type. Searching contract ext:pdf lists attachment PDFs by name alongside every other PDF on the disk; Cmd-Return reveals one in Finder, Space previews it, and Cmd-C copies its full path. It asks for Full Disk Access for exactly this reason, and if you decline, it tells you plainly that Mail is among the folders it cannot see.
Two limits to be clear about. It searches names and paths, not the text inside messages, so a search for a phrase you remember from the email body still belongs in Mail. And it shows you the file, not the message; for the conversation around the attachment, go back to Mail and search the sender.
Questions
Why does Finder search not find an attachment I can see in Mail? Because the attachment lives inside your Library folder, which Finder search excludes by default, and because Spotlight indexes the message rather than the file. Search in Mail, or include system files in the Finder search.
Can I delete the Mail Downloads folder? You can empty it safely. Everything in it is a copy made when you opened an attachment; the original stays in the message. If you edited a file in there and want to keep it, move it somewhere sensible first.
The attachment shows a download arrow instead of opening. Where is it? On the server. Your account is set to download Recent or None, so older attachments are fetched when you click them. Change the Download Attachments setting to All if you want everything kept locally, and give Mail time to fetch it.
Where do attachments go when I drag them out of a message? Wherever you drop them. Dragging to the Desktop or a Finder window makes a copy there; the message keeps its own. There is no single “attachments folder” that macOS fills automatically apart from the Mail Downloads folder described above.