Every once in a while we’ll get a simple-enough question where we have no choice but to provide an embarrassing answer.  The lack of an attachment cleanup tool was one such situation where we’ve had to tell people that Cerb4 didn’t provide an easy way to remove bloated attachments from tickets.  This is especially embarrassing when the inquiring person is an On-Demand customer who knows we’re billing them for storage.  Oops!  (We’re not evil enough to have done that on purpose!)

Thankfully, as of Build 809 we can now just give people the reasonable answer: “It’s simple!  Go into Helpdesk Setup and click on the Attachments tab.”

Like all lists in Cerb4, you’re able to customize the columns and filters for the attachments list.  This makes it incredibly easy to find attachments by size, age, file extension, mime type, or whether you received or sent the file.

The ability to filter by outgoing attachments is especially useful if your team is in the habit of sending out duplicates for large PDF files, ZIP files, etc.  There’s no reason you need to keep those things in the database once your mail is sent.  In the future we’d like to provide an attachments library for that situation where frequently used attachments would only be linked (and not copied) when reused, but this at least allows you to recover your disk space in the meantime.

Another situation where you can recover disk space wasted by attachments is in getting rid of old “original_message.html” files.  These are added when a message provided HTML content.  Cerb4 will convert these messages into plain text and provide you an HTML attachment to view the original message.  Once you’ve handled a ticket there’s usually no reason you’d want to go back to these tickets and view the HTML.  A search for these files turned up tens of thousands of matches in our live helpdesk.

Sometime in the very near future we’ll add a bulk deletion option, since it’s tedious when you’re trying to clear out thousands of rows in batches of 100.  We had a lot of other things on our plate this release and figured a good solution, while less than a perfect solution, was better than no solution.  If you sort your results by the largest files first then you’ll recover the most space in the fewest moves.

Here’s a screenshot of the attachments cleanup tool: (click to zoom)

Enjoy!
-Jeff@WGM