This is my first post in quite a while! I wanted to share a little tool I put together to address a problem I’m sure many of us have faced. My Gmail account was nearing its quota, so I wanted to download all the photos and movies attached to the older emails before I went and deleted all the older stuff to make space.

There is no way to do this natively in Gmail, and the only other solutions I could find for bulk saving Gmail attachments were browser add-ons and Office macros that I didn’t feel comfortable running against my Google account. So, I developed a workflow using Mail.app, Automator, and a bit of AppleScript (see below). Yes, this is a heavily Mac-centric solution, but you use the tools that are available to you, right?

1. Configure Mail.app to sync with your Gmail account
2. Start Automator and select New Workflow
3. Drag the “Get Selected Mail Items” action from the Library over to the workflow area. Make sure “messages” is selected in the drop down menu next to “Get selected”.
4. Drag the “Run AppleScript action from the Library to the workflow area. Paste the following code into the text box of the script action:

   on run {input, parameters}
       set attachmentsFolder to ((path to desktop folder) & "Gmail Attachments") as text
       
       tell application "Finder"
           if not (exists folder attachmentsFolder) then
               display dialog "Folder doesn't exist: " & attachmentsFolder
           end if
       end tell
       
       tell application "Mail"
           repeat with eachMessage in input
               set {year:y, month:m, day:d, time:t} to date received of eachMessage
               set hr to t div hours
               set min to t mod hours div minutes
               set sec to t mod minutes
               set datestr to (y * 10000 + m * 100 + d) as string
               set timestr to (hr * 10000 + min * 100 + sec) as string
               
               repeat with eachAttachment in eachMessage's mail attachments
                   set originalName to name of eachAttachment
                   set savePath to attachmentsFolder & ":" & datestr & "-" & timestr & "-" & originalName
                   save eachAttachment in file savePath   
               end repeat
           end repeat
       end tell
   end run
   
   

   Note: this code assumes you have a writable folder called ~/Desktop/Gmail Attachments. You can change that path if you so desire.

5. In Mail.app, highlight the messages you want to extract the attachments from. You can, for example, search for messages older than a particular date, or those that have JPEG attachments, etc.
6. Back in Automator, click “Run” in the top right corner or hit Cmd+R. This will start the workflow which will go through each attachment from each highlighted message, and save it with a time-stamped filename based on the date and time the message was received.

Hopefully this is helpful. Leave me a comment if you have any feedback.

GitHub is an amazing tool which holds a lot of promise for pushing open source software development forward. I say that because they make the process of forking someone else’s repository and then merging your changes (with their permission, of course) back into the master repo as simple as a few mouse clicks. I, for example, contributed a patch that made jQuery CSP-compatible which was later pulled into the jQuery trunk.

Since GitHub has become the industry standard for sharing code, I’ve started the process of moving all of my open source tools to a repository there. So far, I have only moved my Python CIDR block converter, but the rest should follow soon!