Unattach was created by me, Dr Rok Strniša, a solopreneur with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry. Originally from Slovenia, I earned my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, and have held various roles at renowned tech companies, such as Citrix, Winton and Improbable.
I originally started Unattach as a small side project to help my dad manage his business Gmail account more efficiently. Over time, it has evolved into a popular web application, now helping thousands of users around the world manage their email attachments.
If you are not signed in to Unattach, press the 'Get Started' button in the top-right. Here, you can sign up with Google or email+password, or you can sign in if you already have an Unattach account.
After you have signed in to Unattach, press 'Sign in with Google' to give Unattach permissions to your Gmail account.
You can then search for emails (e.g. those larger than 5 MB), select one or more, and press the 'Process Selected Emails' button - the default settings will simply download the emails' attachments.
Unattach should work with any major browser. However, please note that only Google Chrome is officially supported.
No. Authorization works through OAuth 2.0, which means that you authenticate with Google directly, and then Google gives Unattach a token, which gives it temporary permissions to your account.
No. All personal data flows only between Gmail servers and your browser. For more info, see our plainly-written Privacy Policy.
The app downloads the selected email from your Gmail account to your browser. Depending on your options, it also modifies the attachments in the local copy of this email, inserts the copy into your Gmail account, and then removes the original email from your Gmail account. All email metadata (like the 'Received Date') is preserved.
Yes. You can achieve this with the Email Inserter tool.
When you enable the 'Backup Email' option within Advanced Options, you also obtain the .EML file for each processed email. The .EML file contains the whole email, including its metadata and its attachments.
You can open Email Inserter through the menu at the top-right within the Unattach app. There, you can select one or more .EML files, which will be inserted into your Gmail account as new emails.
Try disabling any ad blockers for the app's URL (https://unattach.app/web), because they may be preventing Google authentication and communication with Gmail, both of which are essential for the app.
Yes. You can upload your attachments to your Dropbox account using a custom directory structure. (Configured in Advanced Options.)
Once the files are in your Dropbox, you can use the Dropbox desktop app (which can be obtained here) to have a synchronized copy of the whole directory structure anywhere on your computer.
We support APNG, AVIF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and WebP.
This normally happens when an email contains attachments with the same filename. Unattach will still process all attachments, but the later attachments will overwrite the former ones.
A way to resolve this is to include ${EMAIL_PART} within your Filename Schema. To ensure that attachments with the same name across emails don't overwrite each other, also include ${ID:-4}, i.e. the last 4 letters of the email's ID.
It's also possible that your Attachment Filename Filter is not set to *, which means that Unattach may be filtering out some attachments.
You may notice that Unattach moves the original emails to Bin, but can't see the modified emails, i.e. the ones with attachments removed.
Most email clients show the modified emails where the original ones were. The exceptions are some versions of Outlook, which show the modified emails as if they just arrived.
Within Unattach, if you press on the title of the email after its attachments have been removed, Unattach will open the modified email in Gmail's web interface. There, you can confirm that Unattach did what it was supposed to do.
By default, Unattach moves the original emails into Bin, allowing you to revert the operations in case Unattach didn't do what you expected.
Unattach replaces your original email with a smaller one. By default, Unattach puts the original email into Gmail's Bin. While the original email is in the Bin, no Google storage is freed.
Gmail will automatically permanently-delete the original email after it has been in the Bin for 30 days. You can also manually empty the Bin, which will immediately free your Google storage.
If you would like Unattach to permanently-delete the original email instead of putting it in the Bin, please select 'Permanently Delete Original Email' in Advanced Options.
Reset the password for your Unattach account to a strong password that you can share with others.
Each user can use this password to sign in to Unattach, and then sign in to their own Gmail account.
No. Unattach will not work correctly if you use POP to access Gmail, because POP moves emails from the server to your local machine, while Unattach relies on modifying existing emails on Gmail servers.
Note that it's fine if you use POP only to get emails into Gmail from other email accounts.
Unattach uses Google's Restricted Scopes, since it requires special permissions to update your emails in Gmail:
Unattach passed these checks. If Unattach had not passed these checks, Google would not allow you to give Unattach these special permissions to your Gmail account.
The Google sign-in process relies on pop-ups and redirects. Please ensure that these are not disabled in your browser.
The simplest option is to enable the 'Zip Before Downloading' within the 'Advanced Options' of Unattach. As the name suggests, this puts each attachment into a separate zip file before downloading it. The browser will normally not open the zip file.
Your browser may also be configured to open certain types of files automatically. If you're using Chrome, you can clear such settings by going to Settings > Advanced > Downloads, and pressing on Clear for the 'Open certain file types automatically after downloading' option.
If your Internet connection is fast, then the most likely reason is Gmail's rate limiting. So, enjoy a coffee while Unattach does its work ☕
Unattach is operating on a relatively low budget, and cannot afford an expensive marketing campaign. The app's ranking is slowly increasing on Google search results.
If you'd like to help others more easily discover the app, you can:
Press 'Manage subscription' in the app's menu (top-right).
If you subscribed through Stripe (debit/credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay), press 'Cancel plan' in the page that appears.
If you subscribed through PayPal, select '42nd Universe Ltd' on the page that appears, then press 'Cancel'.
In either case, this will stop your subscription plan from renewing. You will continue getting the benefits of your subscription plan until the end of the already-paid period.
Go to your Google account's permissions, select Unattach and then press on 'Remove Access'.
We are not planning on releasing any new versions of the desktop app. If you own a copy of the desktop app, you can continue using it.
When the desktop app eventually stops working (e.g. when Gmail changes its protocol), the attachments you downloaded and any emails you updated will continue to be accessible.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us.