Earlier I mentioned how you could download multiple email attachments from Gmail and your other email accounts at once as a zip file using the free drop.io service. Unfortunately, drop.io shut down after it got acquired and therefore the previous trick no longer works.

There’s however a useful Windows-only utility called Mail Attachment Downloader (link that, as the name suggests, can help you download file attachments from your online email accounts to the desktop with some simple search filters. It works with Gmail, Google Apps, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts.

Download Email Attachments from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. in Bulk

Launch the app and provide your email login credentials. The tool will connect to your mail account, will search for any messages in your Inbox that match the criteria and will download them to your local folder. If you are using two-step verification with Gmail, you will have to create an application specific password first.

By default, it will scan and act on all unread messages in your inbox that include attachments. However, you may setup filters (similar to Gmail to that it downloads attachments from specific messages only. For example, messages that are from a particular email address or those that have a particular word in the subject.

If your email inbox is getting full, you may also use the utility to download all the bulky attachments that have a size greater than ‘n’ MB or match a particular filetype like movies, music, .zip files, etc.

Also see: Save Gmail Attachments to Google Docs