anyone know if you can get the mail.app in osx to automatically save attachments?

What I'd like to be able to do is email myself .torrent files and then get my mac to save to the desktop so my bittorrent client can open them as it monitors the desktop.

Not heared of something like that before, but I imagine that with a bif of crafty scripting you should be able to do this (like with Automator, or Apple Scripts)

anyone know if you can get the mail.app in osx to automatically save attachments?

What I'd like to be able to do is email myself .torrent files and then get my mac to save to the desktop so my bittorrent client can open them as it monitors the desktop.

I don't know how to do this & I don't fully understand what you are trying to achieve but I was going to recommend macosxhints.

I had a little look & found this: Use AppleScript and Mail to auto-start torrent downloads.

Apologies if I've misunderstood what you're trying to do.