I guess that this is some of what will be fixed in the upcoming Android 2.1 release for the phone. It should've been out the doors by now, but according to SE it will start distribute this in the end of October.

If you can't wait - or the update don't fix this, others might know of alternative apps that can do what you need it to do.

An alternative is to take the road down the root way.
It might get you some settings that's not open in the default firmware.
I don't have any information on this other than to head over to the xda-developers forum and check what they've got.

Take a look here for the firmware update post from SE
Update on Updates | Product Launch Blog

 

Interesting thread! As only last night I was using the built in GMail App and one of the PDF's which was around 2M in size would not open. There were two other PDF's which opened fine.

I then downloaded a free PDF viewer, but then realised I was actually unable to separate the attachment from GMail and save it, so that I could then open it with the 3rd party PDF reader.

Odd, you can't Save attachments. Very odd indeed. Not sure why this would be an Android issue though? Surely the GMail App should have the option to "Save Attachment" irrespective of the OS version ?

 

Just as added suggestions you could try Handcent SMS which I have found to work better than the stock app at some things, and I have heard that it helps on the mini's with saving files from attachments.

You could also download a file manager such as Astro or Linda to the find the saved file on your SD card.

The large ones come with OfficeSuite included but I believe you can download it for the minis from

2010 August | Product Launch Blog

Hope it helps.

 

Sorry misunderstood original query! Have you tried a third party email app? I use k-9 but you either love it or hate it. The other one I have heard good things about is Mail Droid. Maybe these give better functionality over attachments.

 

Guys,

See if this helps... My friend had send me an .apk file which i could not download as there is no option to download in Gmail App...

So i zipped it and send again... when i previewed the zip file, i could save the file... it got saved in /sdcard/download which i could unzip and use it through Astro..