How to find a specific attachment in Gmail? The missing “attachment view”.

So you’ve spent what feels like hours looking for an attachment that you know must be somewhere in your e-mail archive (or inbox?). You are certain it’s there, and wish there would be a better way to search for it than trying advanced search magic, trying to come up with names that could bring you closer to the holy grail, and desperately clicking through a number of threads in the search for a single file?

Although advanced search is powerful, and can help you get there if you have a somewhat precise idea about the name of the e-mail or name of the attachment, and you turn off threading of e-mails, nothing beats dropping the e-mails (or most of them) and just being able to search and preview the attachments.

This issue has been nicely addressed in a desktop e-mail client Postbox, which I’ve been using in my pre-cloud days, but since I now channel all my e-mail into one Google Apps inbox in order to use multiple addresses and at the same time leverage the advantages of the cloud, using Postbox became redundant. (Actually, I still use desktop e-mail, but more on that some other time.) Its “attachment view” used to do the trick, all of the time, without problems.

Recently, I was trying to find a similar way of searching for and previewing attachments in Google Apps — natively, or using a plugin. When almost desperate, I remembered inbox by Google. An “alternative webmail” for Gmail that I’ve tested some time ago, and stopped using because of finding it too cluttered. But one place where it truly excels is attachment search. In search results, it:

• shows you all attachments from a specific thread below the thread preview itself (not just attachments of a single e-mail, or last e-mail, but all attachments from the whole discussion!)
• it lets you preview the attachments from the thread and cycle through them regardless of where in the thread they appear
• it lets you save them without accessing the original e-mail

One search away, I was able to retrieve the attachments I was looking for in seconds. In the cloud. Magic!

Perhaps only a side feature for Inbox by Google, if you’re (for whatever reason) sending back and forth a lot of attachments instead of using tools better suited for the job of exchanging files, this is a must-have feature with the best implementation from among all desktop and cloud e-mail clients: usable, fast, and thanks to advanced search, very, VERY flexible.