How to automatically save Gmail attachments to Google Drive
Yevhen Zakharchenko
CFO-as-a-Service | Strategic Planning, Analysis and Financial Reporting
If you receive a lot of emails with attachments that need to be saved to 谷歌 Drive or Dropbox , it's time to automate this process to save valuable time. With the help of Zapier , a powerful automation tool, you can streamline your workflow by automatically saving Gmail attachments to Google Drive or Outlook emails to Dropbox. In this article, I'll guide you through the process in simple steps with screenshots.
Creating the workflow
To set up this automation, we only need a 2-step Zap, consisting of a trigger and an action. The trigger will be a new attachment in your Gmail inbox. This means that the Zap will start whenever a new email with an attachment arrives in your inbox. Configure the trigger by specifying any filters, such as specific senders or subjects, if you want to narrow down the types of emails to monitor.
Once the trigger is set up, the next step is to configure the action that will take place. For the action, select the 'Upload File' event. This action will upload the attachment from the email to a specified folder in your Google Drive. Configure the action by selecting the folder where you want the attachments to be saved. You can also specify file naming conventions if needed.
Workflow in action
Now, let's test our workflow. I'm creating and sending a new email with an attachment.
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As you can see below, the email with the attachment has arrived in my mailbox. Zapier will detect the new email, and if everything is set up correctly, the attachment will be automatically uploaded to your specified Google Drive folder.
Yes, immediately after receiving that email, the attachment was automatically uploaded to the folder on my Google Drive that I preselected in the configuration.
Now you can enjoy automated attachment saving, whenever you receive an email with an attachment in Gmail, Zapier will automatically save the file to your specified folder in Google Drive. By the way, in its free pricing plan, Zapier allows you to create 2-step Zaps, which are sufficient for autosaving your attachments.
Please let me know in the comments if there are any other processes you would like to automate in your work, and I will describe a relevant solution in the next edition of my newsletter.
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I've tried this with a big ugly messy result. I get three emails daily from SmartMeterTexas - one for me and two for my church. Each email has a small file attached that gives the results of the day's meter reading. The file attached is a two-line .CSV file that contains the date and time, the old meter reading from yesterday, the new meter reading from today, and the difference (kWh used). Each file has a unique name that contains the date and meter's ESIID. Typically I just open each one in gmail and copy the relevant data into a larger spreadsheet where I can make pretty graphs and stuff. I already have a gmail filter, so these messages are easy to find by their label, and I archive them out of the inbox after I've dealt with them. So this seemed useful. However, there's so there that is more confusing than simple. The required file with all the different IDs? I just selected the "From Smart Meter Texas". I created a folder in my Google Drive to receive these, and specified that folder. Output file? I want it the same as the name that's given with the date and ESIID. But what I ended up with was a huge filename of about 300 random characters that I can't open or delete. Yuck.