How to automatically upload Gmail attachments to Google Drive
Gmail > Google DriveEmail received
Upload file💡 About this workflow
When I was the product lead for Gmail, we were constantly trying to figure out ways to help users get the important information coming in through their email into other tools. Perhaps the most common example of this was the need to save attachments to Google Drive. People need to do this for a ton of reasons: uploading invoices and receipts to a finance folder, saving signed documents from e-signature tools to a legal folder, adding incoming resumes to a hiring folder, and much more. To make this easy, we built a little button that users could click on top of an attachment to store it in Drive in one click. This helped a bit, but it still fell short in a few ways. First, you’d have to open the email, scroll down, and remember to click it for each attachment. Second, to put the file in the right folder, you’d have to click many more times to find the right place. Third, you couldn’t change the title of the attachment before it was saved. We built Relay.app to do this better. Relay.app is a workflow automation tool that lets you automate actions across Gmail, Google Drive, and many other apps. Using Relay.app, you can automatically upload new attachments into the right folder in Google Drive. Unlike other automation tools, Relay.app lets you add human-in-the-loop steps, for example to edit the title of the document before it gets saved. This guide will walk you through how to set it up!
Add the Gmail trigger
Every playbook starts with a trigger. The trigger detects changes in your connected apps and runs your playbook in response.
Click "Add trigger" and select "Email received" under Gmail. Then, provide the necessary criteria like a certain sender, set of keywords, or labels. If this is your first time using a Gmail integration in Relay, you'll be prompted to connect your Gmail account.
Now, every time an email is received in Gmail that matches your criteria, your playbook will run automatically.
Add the Google Drive Upload files automation
Now you can add a new step to your playbook that will upload files to Google Drive. Select "Upload files" from the list of Google Drive automations.
Connect Google Drive to Relay if you haven't already, then specify which folder in Drive you want to receive the attachments.
Turn on the playbook
When you are finished setting up your playbook, it's time to activate it.
The playbook will now run automatically whenever an email is received in Gmail that matches your criteria.
What will you automate?
