Save email and attachments to Google Drive

Why save email to Google Drive

Google Drive is where many teams keep the documents that matter: shared with the accountant, searchable, organised by client or project. Email is where those documents arrive. The gap between the two is filled by someone downloading attachments and re-uploading them, usually weeks late.

With MXcatch, an address on your domain — invoices@, contracts@, client-acme@ — saves everything it receives straight into a Drive folder. No browser extension, no script running on someone's laptop.

What ends up in Drive

MXcatch creates a folder MXcatch/<folder name> in your Drive. Each email gets its own subfolder, named by date, subject and message id:

My Drive/MXcatch/Contracts/
  2026-11-10 Signed agreement – Acme BV (19980)/
    message.eml
    message.pdf
    agreement-signed.pdf
  2026-11-13 Amendment 2 for review (20291)/
    message.eml
    message.pdf
    amendment-2.docx

• message.eml — the original email, headers and all.
• Attachments — every attached file under its original name. Word, Excel and PDF files open in Drive's previewer.
• Extra formats — with Also save as, a PDF, HTML, text or JPG copy of the email itself, so you can read it in Drive without an email client.

Keeping a PDF of the message next to the attachment is what makes this useful months later: you see what the sender wrote — "here is the signed version, note the change to clause 4" — not just a file with no context.

Setting it up

1. Add your domain and point its MX records at MXcatch — per-provider instructions.
2. Create an alias, such as contracts@.
3. Add the action. Go to Domains → your domain → the alias → + Add action and choose Save to Google Drive.
4. Click Connect Google Drive, sign in with Google and approve access.
5. Choose a folder name and any extra formats, save, and send a test email with a file attached.

What MXcatch can see in your Drive

Only what it made. The connection uses Google's drive.file scope, which grants access to files and folders created by MXcatch and nothing else. It cannot list your Drive, open your documents, or read files other people have shared with you. You sign in at Google, so MXcatch never sees your password, and you can remove access from your Google account's security settings at any time.

Useful arrangements

A folder per client or project

Each alias has its own actions. Give each client an address — acme@, globex@ — with its own folder name, and share each Drive folder with the people working on that account. With a catch-all, you can hand out new addresses without creating them first.

Drive plus a spreadsheet

Add the Google Sheets action to the same alias and every email is also logged as a row — received, sender, subject, attachments — in a spreadsheet next to the folder. See email to Excel. The Sheets action is part of the Business plan (€19/month).

Forwarding from Gmail

If the mail arrives in a Gmail inbox you do not control, a Gmail filter can auto-forward matching messages to your MXcatch alias, and they are filed in Drive from there.

Other places to keep it

Prefer Dropbox? The Save to Dropbox action works the same way. If you want storage that scripts and tools read in bulk, write to your own bucket with Save to S3, filed by date.