Introducing Save Emails, a new Google Docs add-on that will help you easily save email messages and file attachments from Gmail to your Google Drive automatically. The emails threads are converted and saved as PDF files in Drive while the attachments are saved in their native format.

You can use the Google add-on to save images, videos, Office documents, project backups and everything else from Gmail to your Google Drive. It also supports the Gmail size search operator so if your mailbox is running out of space, use the add-on to quickly move the large file attachmetns to Drive and delete the corresponding email from Gmail.

Download Gmail Attachments & Emails to Google Drive

The YouTube video will help you get started in 2 minutes.

All you have to do is visually create a rule, similar to how your create filters in Gmail, and then specify a folder in your Google drive. The add-on runs in the background and will automatically download the matching emails to the corresponding Drive folder. You can choose to save the email message only, the included attachments or both.

The add-on runs every hour but if you would like to speed up things a bit, you can manually start the downloads as well. While you are inside the Google Sheet, go to Addons, Save Emails and Attachments and then choose Manage Rules. Now pick any of available rules that you have previously created and tap the Run button to instantly download the matching emails to your Google Drive.

Once an email thread is added to Google Drive, a label “Saved” is applied to the message in Gmail to indicate that the thread has been processed by the add-on and it won’t be processed in the next iteration.

Download Save Emails

Internally, there’s a Google Script that is doing all the hard work. It connects to your Gmail, pulls the matching threads and saves them to Drive via the various Google Apps Script APIs.

The add-on is completely free but there’s a premium version as well that offers a few additional benefits. With premium, you can create unlimited number of mapping rules, the Gmails are saved to Drive at a much faster rate (within 10-15 minutes) and you get email support as well.

If you are wondering why use an add-on where you have services like Zapier or IFTTT that offer similar features, here’s a clue. The Save Emails add-on can process both new (incoming) email as well as old messages in your mailbox. It converts your email messages into high-quality, print-ready and searchable PDF files. And you can run the add-on manually to save emails on demand.