Emails and their attachments can be saved separately to an area in SharePoint. In this article we will see how you can design your metadata and views so that you can see the emails and their separately saved attachments displayed together.

Solution

Here’s How

There are 3 steps:

1. Record the Received Time and Conversation Topic attributes of the email as metadata attributes for its attachments by enabling the Reuse email properties to apply to attachments setting in MacroView DMF.
   
   
2. Include those metadata columns in the content type(s) that will be used when saving attachments separately.  Note that you should set additional columns to Hidden.
   
   
3. Include those metadata columns in a view that shows both emails and non-emails.

Step 1

In DMF go to File>Options>Office and enable the setting as illustrated below.

Step 2

Open SharePoint in the browser and make changes to the content types. In this example we have a Document and Email content type. To make changes:    

1. Navigate to your library settings.
2. Locate your content types and open the Document content type.
3. Under columns select the ‘Add from existing site or list columns’.
4. Add the columns from the screenshot below and save.

Step 3

Add these additional metadata columns to a View that displays both emails and non-emails. If you are using folders, you will need to use a view that Ignores Folders.

In the screenshots below you can see we have switched to view all documents and we have sorted by ‘Received Time’ (you could also use ‘Conversation Topic’). This groups the emails and corresponding attachments together.

Notes:

This technique will not work for attachments that were already saved before the additional metadata columns were added.

This technique works for both SharePoint Online and On-premises.

If you want to try out this technique you can create a suitable test library with two content types (Email and Document) using MacroView Solution Provisioning (MVSP).