One of the biggest problems I have with Gmail is the way you attach stuff. Gmail outperforms every other app with this exception, the time Outlook can save using drag and drop is totally lost with web based clients. gAttach is a lightweight application designed to change that, although as you will see, only in some cases.

The application allows you to use the “send to email” shortcuts in Windows to attach messages to Gmail messages (or Google Apps Mail). You select the files in Outlook, Windows Photo Gallery and most importantly the exporer interface (the Windows interface). It works much like Outlook, just select the files you need and click the email button, or send to email link via the right click context menu. A message will appear showing the attaching progress, you may need to log in, and the message will be saved as a draft. You can opt to access this draft immediately by launching Gmail, or to just save it as a draft without accessing it at once.

This is a huge, huge help in two cases. One is if you have a load of files to send someone, but you don’t want to zip them up. Even if you have 3-5 it may be more productive to use gAttach. This will save you the browsing and manual attaching you usually need to go through. The other case is when you want to create 5-6 drafts quickly with different attachments, or perhaps just save a backup copy for yourself on your Gmail server. In this case the fact that you do not need to access the interface all the time is a huge time bonus.

The only time I find that the app is of no use if you have 1-2 attachments to add and you want to send the email right away, which is most often the case for me. Since the files need to be attached, you may need to log in and the message is saved as a draft, Gmail is loaded in a new window so will need to load, this may take more time than actually just doing things through the Gmail interface.

Nevertheless, gAttach can save you a boatload of time if you have some serious attaching to do and I can heartily recommend it to anyone, it works like a charm, thanks to Freewaregenius for their great find.