Attachments.Me Rethinks Email Attachments: How Dropbox, Box.net and Gmail Should Work Together

4 min read,

Attachments.me is a free web service that gives you a taste of some advanced attachments management within your email inbox. They recently updated their service a bit with nice features like automatic filing, a new iPhone application and integration with Box.net.

This service is a great example of what the “cloud” should be and how cloud services should work together. You have your Gmail which is basically a “cloud” inbox, and you have your Dropbox with some data stored in the “cloud”. Up until now, you’ve uploaded your files from your local Dropbox folder into emails composed within Gmail, right? Why? Try out Attachments.me and upload insert files from Dropbox into Gmail.

Visualize Your Attachments

You’ve probably tried to find that image someone sent you a few months ago. What were the keywords in the email again? Looking up by the sender isn’t too helpful as there are hundreds of newer emails there. Attachments.me will scan through all of your attachments and create a nice gallery of them for improved and better searching!

Check out how Attachments.me actually work:

[youtube width=”555″ height=”312″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRGdhlSKtIM[/youtube]

Once you get used to using it, you’ll find out how managing email attachments can be easier then ever! But visualizing isn’t everything Attachments.me does; as mentioned before, its integration with Dropbox actually, as they say, glues the cloud together. Via an extension for Google Chrome, you can have your Attachments.me in your Gmail profile. Connect it to your Dropbox and you’ll have a new way of inserting attachments in your emails.

You’ll be able to pick a file directly from your Dropbox right from the Gmail’s interface; a temporary link to the file will be placed into the email. The file itself doesn’t have to be in a public folder, of course.

The Box

This works in both ways; if you got an attachment in an email, you can save it directly to your Dropbox folder. Not to your local computer and then have it uploaded to the Dropbox. Instead, you’ll save it to Dropbox and it will get downloaded to your computers connected with your Dropbox account.

[youtube width=”555″ height=”312″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynSdyFpIE4[/youtube]

From now on, Attachments.me works well with Box.net as well. So it’s up to you to choose between Dropbox and Box.net – whatever rocks your boat, Attachments.me supports it.

The iPhone App

The new iPhone app for Attachments.me can serve as an additional email client on your iPhone. Why should you use it, you might ask? Well, all of your files are in the cloud, right? Email is also in the cloud. With Attachments.me’s new app, you can compose an email and attach files to it from your Dropbox or from your Gmail attachments. That way the files won’t get downloaded to your iPhone, saving you time and even more important – your data plan.

The same goes with incoming attachments; when you receive an email with  attachments, you can choose where  it should be saved – to your phone, or (preferably) to your cloud system. Once it gets saved there, you can use the application to search for every attachment in your email inbox just like you would on acomputer, with thumbnails helping you to find the right one.

Try the app right nowget it from the AppStore!

Automatic Filing

If you’re a productivity geek, you’ll love Automatic Filing. Think of it as a filtering system for your attachments; it allows you to set up specific rules which will automatically sort your attachments into your Dropbox or Box.net accounts. To use Automatic Filing, you’ll need to use their Google Chrome extension to set it up properly, but there will be the option of setting things up right in Attachments.me profile.

Check out how these new features work and try Attachments.me yourself!

[youtube width=”555″ height=”312″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O9GRHd-Sgc[/youtube]