How do I bulk-remove attachments in Gmail without losing the emails?

Here's what I found from the forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/qMaOzBbu97k Here is a solution for deleting email attachments in Gmailwithout deleting the message itself.  This is a better way then forwarding the message to yourself because you actually save the original message and timestamps, but with attachments removed.  This solution gets the results you want, albeit a little time consuming. The basic idea is access your gmail account as an IMAP account using Thunderbird, and then use Thunderbird’s feature for deleting attachments.  You just need to make sure messages are first moved to a local folder, then moved back to an imap folder. Details: - Determine messages in Gmail that need an attachment removed. - Access these messages in Thunderbird via IMAP access.  To make this easier, in the Gmail web interface you can create a new label such as "delete-attachments" for these messages. -Select messages in TB and "Copy To" a local folder.  This will download a copy of the message and attachment(s) to your local drive. -Then, using the Gmail web interface, delete the messages permanently. -Return to Thunderbird and access the messages stored in the local folder.  -Delete the attachments in the locally-stored messages individually.  -Finally select the messages and use the "Move To" command and select a label within Gmail to move the message.  This will copy the messages back to Gmail without the attachment and upload the message to Gmail servers with original time stamps.  Notes: -While attachments are delete with messages saves, you will probably lose any labeling that you had previously.  If there were no labels, then the easy solution is to "Move To" the label "All Mail."  If there was a primary label, then you can move the message to this label to at least return the message with one label.  If your labels are filter based, then you could probably update filters and apply to all conversations. -Another complication is conversations. Gmail labels conversations instead of individual messages.  This means that in TB, in the “delete-attachments” folder, messages display individually and so some messages will not have attachments while others do.  If you move those individual messages to another label such as "attachment removed," then gmail might update the associated messages--that have attachments--as attachment removed. -If you try to delete attachments in TB from messages in an IMAP folder—instead of a local folder—then you will essentially delete the message.  The problem is that, apparently, IMAP has no protocol for deleting attachments.  So what would happen is that gmail would delete the original message and create a new message without the attachment, but with a new message date of the current date and time.  Thus, if the particular message was dated months ago, the new message copy would have the current date. Hope that helps!

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At this time, Gmail does not provide an option to delete attachments. This is not some oversight, thousands of people have been asking for this feature on their product forums and feedback forms for at least 6 years. But Google has intentionally ignored the requests and continues to purposefully prevent users from deleting attachments. One can only assume this is part of their business plan to require people to pay for more storage. That is a fair business model, if one needs more storage one should pay for it. But the user should be able to determine whether or not they want to keep old attachments (for budget, security or personal reasons).Google does provide great search tools, that let you find for all emails before a certain date with attachments:has:attachment before:2010/12/31 But unfortunately, having found the attachments, you cannot select "delete attachments" from the more button on the list page, or create a filter that automatically does this, or go to the email directly and delete attachments one by one. There are no supported ways to delete attachments from a message. You can select all and delete the entire email message (if you are desperate for space), but that is not recommended for obvious reasons (archiving is very important).Others have listed tedious work arounds like forwarding the email to yourself without the attachment, or importing the emails into Google Drive and running a script and then reimporting them back, etc. These may work, but they are total hacks.