One of our customers is saving Outlook emails into SharePoint; I’ve written an Outlook plugin to do this. The emails themselves are being saved as .msg files within Document Libraries.

However, they’d like a nice column with a little Paperclip icon if the Email has attachments. For normal Lists, there is a column like this (provided that the List allows attachments)…

This shows two list items, one of which has attachments, one of which doesn’t. Indeed, the one with attachments has multiple attachments (a feature that I often forget!)

And we can edit these attachments…

Or add attachments to the List Item which doesn’t have any…

Okay, so Lists can can List Items with Zero to Many attachments. I then went and looked at document library though – and couldn’t see an ‘Attachments’ column…

Trust me, I looked through all the settings and columns available in the views, just in case. The reality is, though, that the reason is pretty obvious – Documents implicitly have one attachment – the document itself! Thus an ‘Attachments’ would just show a series of little paperclip icons – which isn’t dreadfully useful… …and this is why Documents libraries and the like doesn’t show that column.