Skip to main content

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Learning Resources
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell Zapier's products AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Share your knowledge
Give back to the Community by sharing your automation wins and helping to answer questions.

Share your success See unanswered questions User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

  • Home
  • Get Help
  • How Do I
  • How to create new Google Drive folder by subject and transfer Gmail attachments to that folder?
Best answer

How to create new Google Drive folder by subject and transfer Gmail attachments to that folder?

  • February 15, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 286 views
lauri

Hi,

 

Been messing around with Zapier for a while now but can’t figure out if the following is possible. I’ve got a massive amount of email that each have multiple attachments that id need to upload to Google Drive. The problem is that each of these email should be uploaded to a dedicated folder. All off the email have different subjects so i could make a Zapp that creates a folder by the subject but is there any way to add file transfer to the same Zapp? 

*New labeled email in Gmail create new folder by subject and transfer attachments to that folder

Best answer by SamBBest answer by SamB

Hi @lauri, welcome to the Community! 🙂

The New Labeled Email trigger for Gmail wouldn’t trigger for each file individually you’d likely end up with Zip files being uploaded. The New Attachment trigger would likely be the one to use as that would trigger for each file individually. The issue with that is that it would only see new attachments that came in the last hour. But you could set up a Zap with that New Attachment trigger that will create/find the necessary folders and upload the attachments to them going forward.

To move your existing files, if you’re specifically looking to use our Transfer feature to move all the files in bulk into the correct folder that won’t work. You’d need an action to create the folder and an action to upload the file and it’s not possible to have multiple actions in a transfer.

What I’m thinking you could do instead is use Transfer to forward you the emails with their attachments. Then have a Zap that triggers on the attachments in those forwarded emails, creates/finds the relevant folder then uploads the file. Do you think that approach could work for you here?

View original
Did this topic help you find an answer to your question?
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

3 replies

SamB
Community Manager
Forum|alt.badge.img+11
  • SamBCommunity Manager
  • Community Manager
  • 7532 replies
  • Answer
  • February 15, 2023

Hi @lauri, welcome to the Community! 🙂

The New Labeled Email trigger for Gmail wouldn’t trigger for each file individually you’d likely end up with Zip files being uploaded. The New Attachment trigger would likely be the one to use as that would trigger for each file individually. The issue with that is that it would only see new attachments that came in the last hour. But you could set up a Zap with that New Attachment trigger that will create/find the necessary folders and upload the attachments to them going forward.

To move your existing files, if you’re specifically looking to use our Transfer feature to move all the files in bulk into the correct folder that won’t work. You’d need an action to create the folder and an action to upload the file and it’s not possible to have multiple actions in a transfer.

What I’m thinking you could do instead is use Transfer to forward you the emails with their attachments. Then have a Zap that triggers on the attachments in those forwarded emails, creates/finds the relevant folder then uploads the file. Do you think that approach could work for you here?

lauri
1 person likes this
  • lauri
    lauri
lauri
  • lauriBeginner
  • Author
  • Beginner
  • 1 reply
  • February 15, 2023

Hi @SamB 

Thanks you for your answer. Sorry if i wasn’t able to explain the situation well enough or might not understand your solution completely. If i understood you solution correctly it would create as many folders as there are attachments.

So i have close to 1000 emails which each have 1-10 attachments, all of these needs to be in their matching folders. So i’d need to have as many folders as i have emails, some may have 1 attachment some 10 depending on how many attachments were on the email.

SamB
Community Manager
Forum|alt.badge.img+11
  • SamBCommunity Manager
  • Community Manager
  • 7532 replies
  • February 15, 2023

Sorry for any confusion caused here @lauri!

To confirm, there wouldn’t be a folder created for every email. You’d use a Find Folder (Google Drive) action which has the ability to create a folder if it doesn’t find an existing one. So if you had 10 attachments trigger the Zap from 1 email, the first run of the Zap would create the folder then the subsequent ones should then find the first folder and upload the attachments to that same folder.

If it helps, I wrote an article a while back that talks about how to organise email attachments into specific folders, it’s not 100% the exact use case I was suggesting but parts will be relevant to what you’re looking to do:

In the article it talks about how to upload PDFs specifically but you could change it to upload all types of files by omitting the filter that checks that the file is a PDF. Also, instead of using Formatter to extract the client name you’d select the Subject field from the Gmail trigger as the Folder Name. And you can ignore the last part about setting up an autoresponder as that’s not needed for your use case. Aside from those bits it should help to show how to get the Zap to create/find the necessary folders and upload the attachments to them.

I hope that helps to get you started. Please do keep us updated on how you get on! 

Terms & Conditions