Mail.app likes to treat mere links in an RSS entry as “attachments” to be downloaded as a matter of course. This can be fun when there’s a lot of them, such as in this Ruby Inside post about a recent Rails conference in Scotland. Here’s Mail.app’s RSS version of that post, listing 1.2G of “attachments”:
Here’s the offending links:
To make it stop I had to delete the RSS message, set the program on its “quit cycle”, then manually close all attempts to download the damn things until it finally exited:
Not fun. Wish Mail.app had a better way to select which attachments to download. I did nothing, btw, except view the RSS entry.