Move the Apple Mail Download Folder

Apple Mail seems to use its own location for downloading attachments that you double-click on. On my machine, this was in

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail\ Downloads

I wanted those to go into

~/Downloads

And since Apple as a company keeps thinking about even the illiterate, it hides the Library folder, and even if you unhide it for the Finder and create a “Shortcut”, it won’t work. So, open Terminal.app and do

mv ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail\ Downloads/* ~/Downloads
rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail\ Downloads
ln -s ~/Downloads ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail\ Downloads

To fix that.

Interestingly, Apple Mail’s preferences did point to ~/Downloads all the time. But that’s used only when you do a “Save to Downloads Folder.”

Oh well…

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