I recently was sent a link to a movie file in someone’s dropbox via email. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to download. Safari wanted to play it. To download the movie I needed to click in the safari address bar, paste the link, and then press option-return which downloaded the movie instead of playing it.

I was sent a link in my email like this:

"http://dl.dropbox.com/blah/blah/filename.m4v"

When I clicked on the link, it just opened the movie in Safari.

If I tried  ‘Save As’ from Safari I got an error saying “The document could not be exported. ”

When I right clicked on the link in my email and selected ‘Download Linked File’ nothing happens.

Finally I clicked in the safari Address bar after the link address and pressed ‘option-return’ and the movie downloaded to my safari downloads folder.

A little strange -this should be simpler – but a google search revealed others are having similar problems.