Save Gmail Attachments to Your Dropbox With This Add-On
All Browsers: Google and Dropbox are currently collaborating on a new “Dropbox add-on for Gmail” that will make it easy to share your Dropbox content directly into Gmail. Taking a different route also makes it much easier to upload files directly to your Dropbox, saving you the hassle of opening your Downloads folder and manually dragging and dropping a file over you.
The Dropbox Chrome extension does the exact same thing – more than this add-on right now, as I’ll describe a bit – but installing the add-on means you can access those features from any browser you want, as well as the Android Gmail app right out of the box. now and the Gmail app for iOS in the future.
To install the Dropbox add-on, go to the G Suite Marketplace – ignore the fact that it’s named after Google’s paid service – and click the giant Install button on the Dropbox add-on for Gmail. Accept all permissions for the add-on requests and it only takes a few seconds to connect to your Gmail account.
Open Gmail and … nothing has changed. You probably expected to see some kind of Dropbox icon on the right side of the screen, below the Calendar, Save, and Tasks buttons, new additions as part of the Gmail redesign. So do I. And it is the absence of this icon that leads some of those who installed the add-on to assume that something is wrong: the installation is incomplete or the add-on is somehow not working.
This is not entirely true. There is an add-on, it’s just that it’s not going to do everything that Dropbox teased in its announcement yet. Right now, you will see the Dropbox icon popping up in this aforementioned location if you open the email with attachments. Click on it, sign in to your Dropbox account (if you haven’t already) and you can click attachments and save them to any of your current Dropbox folders.
You can’t create new file folders using the add-in, but you can click the three-dot icon at the top of the sidebar to go to the web version of your Dropbox if you need to get a little more organized.
And it’s all. According to Dropbox, the second half of the add-on – the part that makes it easier to transfer files hosted on Dropbox to others – will arrive “later this year.” This is a great feature because you can link directly to files in your Dropbox instead of attaching them to a message that takes up precious space in your Gmail inbox. And you’re more likely to save 2GB of free space in Dropbox than deleting old attachments in Gmail, right?