Saving attachments to email messages is a great way to back up all of your pictures, documents, music, and anything else you email during the day. But doing it manually is not an interesting process, you will most likely miss a few over time, and you are using valuable storage on your computer.
Instead, you can set up email to automatically save attachments to the online file storage. Most cloud storage services have a lot of free space, and the methods below will automatically save email attachments with every new email.
There are two really great ways to automatically save email attachments to cloud storage. The first one we’ll look at uses the Koofr file storage service for both automatic saving and attachment storage; it works with any email, but your files can only be saved to the Koofr storage service.
Another method is more flexible: you can choose a different cloud storage service, but it does not work with all email providers.
- Visit Koofr and create a new account. You can do this with your email address or Google account.
- Select Add> New Folder.
Use Koofr to automatically save email attachments
- Visit Koofr and create a new account. You can do this using your email address or Google account.
- Go to Add Create Folder .
- Call it something about attachments, because this is where all your email attachments will be collected.
- Hover over the new folder to find a button titled Share. Select it and then select “Receive Files”.
- Select Never in the Expiry Date section.
- Copy the email address below and click OK.
- Go to your email provider and set up automatic forwarding for all emails with attachments.
- In Gmail, you can do this by entering your Koofr email address in the forwarding settings in your Gmail account Once you’ve verified that the email address belongs to you, click the arrow next to the search bar and check “Has attachment.”
- From there, select Create Filter and then Redirect to
. - Select New Filter to enable it.
All of your attachments are stored in the folder you created above. What you need to know about this procedure is that emails are saved too, not just file attachments. Thus, it also works as an email backup service.
Unfortunately, you cannot save only attachments, so the folder can quickly become cluttered.
- Open a new Zap page If you are not signed in, you will have the option to create an account.
- Select your email provider in the first text box (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and others are supported) and then New Attachment in the second, Continue.
Automatically save email attachments with Zapier
- Open New Zap Page . If you are not logged in, you have the opportunity to create an account.
- Choose your email provider in the first text box (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, etc. are supported), then New Attachment in the second, followed by Persist .
- Select your email account from the dropdown list or, if required, sign in to establish a connection. Click “Continue”.
- Select a shortcut to save attachments only if the email is marked with the one you selected, or select Inbox and All Shortcuts to save each attachment regardless of how it is marked.
- You can also use this screen to force the attachment to be saved only if the email matches a specific request. For example, to automatically save attachments from a specific person, you would enter from: [email protected].
- When finished, click Continue.
- Optionally, test the procedure by selecting Test and Review, or end by clicking the Test and Continue button.
- Click the plus sign in the Do This section to choose what happens after you receive an email with an attachment found.
- Search for and select the cloud service where you want to save your email attachments. Popular ones such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box are supported.
- Under Select Action Event, select what should happen. In this example we’re using Google Drive, so we’ll select Upload File.
- Click Continue.
- Sign in to your cloud provider when asked.
- Optionally, choose where in your account you want to save attachments.
- For File, select Attachment. If desired, fill in the rest of the fields and click “Continue”.
- If desired, test the subroutine and then click Turn Zap On to enable it.
Using Zapier to automatically save email attachments doesn’t change anything with the original email. The message will not be marked as read, and the attachment and / or message will not be deleted.
Ways to save other email attachments
Zapier and Koofr are the best ways to automatically save email attachments to the cloud, but we shouldn’t overlook other not-so-automatic methods built right into the websites of some email providers.
- In Gmail, for example, you can hover over an attachment and select Save to Drive to instantly transfer it to Google Drive.
- If you’re on Outlook.com, select the cloud icon that appears in attachments to save the file to OneDrive.
- Yandex.Mail users can open the attachment and choose to save to Yandex.Disk.
Another method is cloudHQ. Once set up, it works like this: you open an email with the attachment you want to save and then click a button to choose where in the cloud you want to save it.
It takes a few clicks, but is still better than downloading the attachment and manually uploading it to a file storage site.
You can install three extensions in Chrome for this to work:
- Save emails to Dropbox
- Save emails to Google Drive
- Save emails to OneDrive
This is how it works if you use it in Gmail to save email attachments to Google Drive:
- Open the email with the attachment.
- Click the download button from the menu at the top.
- Select Save to Google Drive.
- Choose a folder if you like, but don’t forget to select “Save Attachments Only” from the drop-down menu.
- If desired, change the name of the attachment and click Save.
- As you can see, cloudHQ can also save the entire message if you like. To do this, simply change the “Save Settings” option.
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