Send your Gmail Attachments to Google Drive

Imagine this. You are reading a Gmail message on your mobile, the message contains one or more file attachments, you apply a label (say GoogleDrive) to that message and automatically all those attachments are saved to one of the folders on your Google Drive.

And since Google Drive will automatically synchronize with your desktop folders, the saved email attachments will instantly download and become available on your local disk as well for offline viewing.

Save Gmail Attachments in Google Drive

You don’t have to install any extensions and the technique will work just fine in the web and mobile version of Gmail (including any of your Gmail Apps that support labels).

Setting the Stage

If you would like to have a similar setup for your Gmail and Google Drive, all you need is a minute. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Assuming that you are logged in to your Google account, create a copy of this sheet in your Google Docs (now Google Drive).
2. Open the sheet and you should see a new Gmail menu – click Initialize and grant the necessary permissions. This is your sheet (see source code) and you are not sharing your Google credentials or data with anyone else.
3. Next go the Gmail menu again and select Run. Close the Google sheet and you are done.

Behind the Scene

Here’s how the program works. The Google sheet will monitor your Gmail mailbox in the background (every two minutes) and as soon as it finds any message that has a label GoogleDrive, it will automatically save all the attachments in that message to the Gmail folder on your actual Google Drive.

Once the basic setup is ready, apply the label GoogleDrive to any of your email messages in Gmail and the attached files should become available in your Drive (both online and offline) in the next few minutes.

Troubleshooting tips

If you are getting errors like “Service invoked too many times,” you can increase the trigger duration. Open the same sheet in Google Docs, go to Tools –> Script Editor and then choose Resources –> Current Script Triggers. Change the value of Minutes timer from “Every 5 minutes” to say “Every 15 minutes”.

If you would like to stop the script from running in the background, go to the same trigger screen and simple delete the “SendToGoogleDrive” time trigger.

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Five ways to access blocked Internet sites

The Internet is a vast expanse and there’s a ton of information out there, most of it is legal, while some of it is illegal. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, sites that have content that may be in the clear might also get blocked by either the authorities, your ISP or sometimes even your office network administrator. Gaining access can be considered to be a very technical and complicated process, but it really isn’t. We’re going to look at some of these ways to unblock sites. Most of these techniques are really simply, while a couple of others might need more than a minute or two to get running.

Unblocking by changing your DNS server

A DNS server is like an index, with a list of domain names - such as YouTube.com, Tech2.com and pretty much every other site on the Internet. When you type in a website address in your browser, your computer sends a request to the DNS server and it tells you the IP address for that site. One of the easiest ways for ISPs to stop access to a particular site is by removing the entries for the sites that need to be blocked. ISPs can choose to redirect the request to a different site or a notice page as well.

A simple DNS server change could open up your connection

However, there is a way around this. There are free, fully open third-party DNS services run by organizations and other ISPs. The most popular ones are run by Google and OpenDNS. All you need to do is change your DNS server settings to theirs. In a typical Windows 7 system, head over to the Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center > Change adapter settings. Right click on your network adapter, click on Internet Protocol Version 4, click on Properties. Click on the Use the following DNS server addresses and enter the DNS server of your choice. Google’s DNS addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, while OpenDNS’ are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Click on OK to save the settings and reboot your PC.

Using browsing proxies

Browsing proxies are services that allow you to use their Internet connection, thus bypassing most of the restrictions setup by the ISPs or the network administrators. There are plenty of these on the Internet that can be accessed through your browser. All you need to do is access them and enter the URL of the site that you want to access in the address bar provided by the site. All the requests will then be channeled through that browsing proxy server.

The only downside to this of course is that if the browsing proxy itself gets blocked by your ISP, you’ll have to find another one. Some of these browsing proxies, depending on how popular they are, can be slow to access. A quick Google search for ‘anonymous browsing proxy’ will give you a long list of services available on the web.

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