Someone needs the email. The approval from the client, the quote from the vendor, the thread where the dates were agreed. You could forward it, and then forward the follow-up, and then forward the attachment they say didn’t come through.

Or you could save the email to Google Drive once and send a link. With Save Emails to Google Drive by cloudHQ, that’s one click from inside the email. The message and its attachments land in Drive as a PDF, you get a shareable link on the spot, and the email stays in your inbox exactly as it was.

Watch how it works

Install the Chrome extension

Add Save Emails to Google Drive from the Chrome Web Store by clicking Add to Chrome, then connect it to your Google Drive account. That’s the whole setup. It lives in your browser, not on your hard drive, and there are no settings to work through before you can use it.

Save one email to Google Drive with one click

Open the email in Gmail. In the toolbar above the message, you’ll see a new Google Drive icon. Click it and choose Save to Google Drive. The email and its attachments are saved to Drive as a PDF.

What you get: the link, the folder, the file

As soon as the save finishes, a confirmation appears with a link to the file in Google Drive. Click it to open the file, or copy it to share.

In Google Drive, the email is in a folder called Emails, and the file is named after the sender’s address, so you can tell what it is from the file list without opening it. The PDF contains the full message, the sender and recipients, the date, and the subject, with the attachments saved alongside it.

Share the saved email instead of forwarding it

This is the part that changes how you work. A forwarded email is a copy that goes stale the moment the thread continues. A saved email in Drive is a file, and files can do things emails can’t.

The save dialog lets you pick the folder, share the file with collaborators, or copy its link, before you’ve left Gmail. From there you set access the way you would for any Drive file. You can add comments to the PDF, highlight the line that matters, and assign a comment to a colleague so it shows up in their to-do list. And because it’s a link, you can drop it into Trello, Asana, Slack, or wherever your team tracks work, so the email lives next to the task it belongs to.

Why file emails in Google Drive

The first reason is finding things. A project’s quotes, timelines, contracts, and the conversation around them can live in one Drive folder, instead of being scattered across a thousand emails that only one person knows how to search.

The second is notes. Once an email is a PDF, you can mark it up: highlight the number you need to question, write yourself a reminder for the next call. You can’t do that in Gmail.

The third is collaboration. Assigning a comment on a Drive file to a colleague is a lightweight way to hand off a task with its context attached, and it works for people who weren’t on the original email.

The fourth is safety. Emails are lost to accidental deletion more than to anything else. A copy in Drive means the thread survives even if the inbox version doesn’t.

The fifth is the link itself. An email you can link to is an email you can put anywhere: in a task card, a Slack channel, a project doc.

Saving many emails at once

This post is about saving one email at a time, because that’s how most sharing happens. When you need to save a batch, there are two ways. Select the emails and click the Google Drive icon to choose between separate PDFs, one merged PDF, or attachments only; that’s covered step by step in How Do I Save Emails to Google Drive? Or, in the current version, select them and drag them onto a Drive folder in Gmail’s sidebar, which we show in Gmail to Google Drive: Drag and Drop Emails Into Your Drive Folders.

Frequently asked questions

How do I save an email in Gmail to Google Drive?

Install Save Emails to Google Drive, open the email, and click the Google Drive icon in the toolbar. The email is saved to Drive as a PDF with its attachments, and you get a link to it.

Does the saved email include attachments?

Yes. The attachments are saved to Google Drive with the email.

Can I share a saved email with someone who doesn’t use Gmail?

Yes. The saved email is an ordinary PDF in Google Drive, so you share it the way you’d share any Drive file, with a link or by adding them as a viewer.

Does saving an email to Drive remove it from Gmail?

No. The email stays in your inbox. Drive gets a copy.

Can I choose which folder the email goes to?

Yes. The save dialog lets you pick any folder in your Google Drive, or create a new one. If you don’t choose, it goes to the Emails folder.

What format is the saved email in?

PDF. Anyone with access to the folder can open it, search it, comment on it, and share it, whether or not they use Gmail.