How to Automatically Copy Gmail Attachments to Dropbox

If you work in an environment where a lot of documents get circulated via e-mail, it’s easy to lose track of them often resulting in disorganized workspace. The simplest way to organize is to have all attachments in one place, a repository such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Since manual saving is not an option when you have to deal with large amount of mails, we can use IFTTT to save Gmail attachments directly in Dropbox account.

For those of you not familiar with it, IFTTT (If This Then That) is a platform for creating simple rules to connect apps and asking them to perform particular actions automatically. We can create automated tasks that looks like “When I get a new thing in A, do this other thing in B”. IFTTT is a reliable service and it is quite useful in variety of cases, try them out even if you dont need Gmail Dropbox integration.

Save All Your Attachments to Dropbox

This recipe is the most straightforward, as it provides no filtering – it simply saves everything attached to Gmail e-mails as it is. In order to do this, follow these steps:

1) Connect your Gmail and Dropbox account via the IFTTT recipe link.
2) After connecting, select or create the Dropbox folder on your own account where you want the attachments to automatically go.
3) Now just add the recipe to your IFTTT account.

Save Attachments from emails having a specific Label

Although the first rule makes sure that all attachments are saved in Dropbox irrespective of mails, often we need only a few selected mail attachments to get copied. This second recipe solves our problem to selectively chose mails whose attachments will get saved. After authorizing and adding the recipe, you will have to specify a Gmail label and a folder name under Advance settings. Once activated, the rule will be triggered when you to apply selected label to the mail, resulting in copy of attachments to your chosen Dropbox folder.

Organize Gmail Attachment’s by Sender’s Address in Dropbox

Another enhanced approach to the above general recipe is to save Gmail attachments by sender’s addresses. After activating this recipe, whenever a new attachment lands in your mailbox, it will automatically get copied under a new folder named with senders email address in Dropbox. These folders will be sorted alphabetically by default for your convenience.

If you are looking to insert Dropbox files directly into Gmail messages, then you should give a try to the official “Gmail for Dropbox” Chrome extension. This will conveniently let you share and view Dropbox files within Gmail.

If Dropbox is not your favorite cloud repository, you can browse for other IFTTT recipes for Google Drive, Box or OneDrive. Just note that in any case, you can only save files with maximum 30 MB in size. But the good news is that any of the above recipes is available in as many as 180 iterations, so don’t get discouraged if you encounter any technical issues – which, in that case, we will be happy to help.