Brothers and Sisters,
First I am assuming that many people use the excellent Thunderbird Email Program. For those who don't know, it's the Email companion for Firefox and made by the same Open Source folks. I think that Thunderbird is every bit as good as any commercial email program, and Thunderbird is completely FREE.
Thunderbird also has the big advantage of being able to use a large number of excellent extensions - much like Firefox.
Pictures and other attachments are many times a pain in dealing with. The attachments can also be displayed inline or embedded in the actual email or be separate. Attachments come in so many ways from so many different programs that one size certainly doesn't fit all in extracting or saving them. I got some great baby pictures last night from my daughter, and I finally decided to look for what's available. Attachment Extractor is one of the most highly rated ones, so I decided to try it.
It took about 30 seconds to setup, and it worked perfectly the very first time. You simply check a few boxes, give the directory where you want to save various kinds of attachments and set it to either manually or automatically process incoming mail. I opted for manual because I always want to see what I'm saving to disk. Attachment Extractor is a tiny and elegant program that just plain works in a very simple way.
If you're tired of trying to figure out all the ways of dealing with various kinds of attachments, get this and give it a try. Look at the other FREE extensions and themes while you're there.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/