Managing email attachments across half a dozen email accounts can be a tedious job. You have to remember all the usernames and passwords and regularly check each of the email accounts for new attachments or files.
Another problem with multiple email accounts is that often, the older attachments get lost among the newer ones. You may have to regularly email clients or customers asking them to resend the older attachments, which eventually kill your precious time and productivity.
In this article, we will learn how to download email attachments from your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail accounts using a free program called Mail Attachment Downloader.
Mail Attachment Downloader is a freeware utility for Windows which can be used to download all email attachments to your computer’s desktop. When downloading your attachments, Mail Attachment Downloader will leave all your email(s) on the server and only download a copy of the attachments. The application will not interfere with any other programs you might be using to download emails (example: Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and so on).
Carefully follow the steps mentioned below:
Go to the Cnet website and click the Download Now link to start downloading the application.
When the download is complete, right click the program and choose Run as administrator. Then install the program by following the instructions of the installation wizard.
When the installation is complete, open Windows Start menu and type mail attachment in the search box. When the results appear, click the application icon to launch the utility.
In the Email field, enter your email address along with the email provider’s name. Thus, if your email provider is Gmail, you have to use username@gmail.com and enter the corresponding password in the Password text box.
Now switch to the Mail server tab and choose your email provider’s mail server, as shown below:
The application will automatically apply the correct port number and the corresponding IMAP host. Keep all other settings as they are.
Next, hit the Change location button and choose a folder on your computer where you want to download all the attachments.
When you are done choosing the local folder, click on Connect and Download.
The application will start downloading all the attachments that are saved in your email account in that local folder.
When the status changes to 100%, click on the Local folder button to open the local folder, where you had chosen to save all the attachments.
That’s it, you have successfully downloaded all the email attachments from your Gmail inbox. Here is what my own attachments folder looks like:
Similarly, you can downloaded all the email attachments from your Yahoo and Hotmail account(s) using the exact same procedure.
This is very useful, you don’t need t configure a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook for downloading the attachments. Another advantage is that the application can periodically check for newer attachments and automatically download them to your computer’s local folder, if you keep the application running in Windows system tray.
Points To Note:
The following points should be noted while using the mail downloader application:
The application will download only those attachments that are in your inbox. If you have archived a lot of messages, you will have to move them to “inbox” first.
You can setup various filters to specify which attachments you want to download. To do this, switch to the Basic filters tab and specify custom rules as per your requirements.
The filters are recommended only for advanced users who know how Gmail search works and what are the different search operators.
You can also setup a schedule, i.e mention a time period when the program runs in the background and checks for newer attachments. Let’s say you want to download email attachments from all the email accounts, everyday at 2 PM at a regular interval of 2 hours.
In that case, switch to the Schedule tab and set all the parameters. An example is shown below:
You can visit the application’s website to learn more usage guides and case studies.
Overall, this is one of the simplest way to download documents, photos, PDFs and other files that were sent as attachments to your Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail account(s). Give this a try!
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