To answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out

To answer your first question: It's certainly possible from a technical level, but I'm not aware of any end-user application that enables this functionality out-of-the-box. One hacky-but-straightforward way to do this would be to take advantage of an email<->filesystem translation like NMH or MBox, and then write some script that would automatically purge the attachments before archiving. You'd still have to download the attachments, I believe; I could be wrong, but I don't think IMAP will let you get around that easily. (To be fair, Gmail's implementation doesn't adhere to IMAP very well in my experience - labels/folders/tags are a major problem - so YMMV).