With Google introducing its Chrome OS, an entirely cloud-based system that leaves nothing on your hard drive, it would seem that one direction today’s gadgets are heading in is a purely cloud-based one. We’re spending less time on our desktops and more time in the cloud – and file storage is certainly no stranger to that concept.
A couple of months ago, we introduced you toCloudy, a Chrome extension that allows you to upload files to your Gmail account directly from your cloud-based storage accounts like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and more. Kloudless is a new Chrome extension that offers the same feature – removing that unnecessary extra step of downloading a file from the cloud only to upload it as an attachment – but takes things one step further, by also allowing you to save files directly from your Gmail account to your cloud storage accounts.
Kloudless closes the gap between email and cloud-storage, creating a link that makes perfect sense, is incredibly convenient, and is one of those features that you won’t know how to live without once you get it set up. Kloudless serves several functions – one of which is to automatically back up your email attachments to cloud-based storage accounts.
When you first install Kloudless you’ll be walked through a series of simple steps to set up your accounts. You’ll first be prompted to connect Kloudless to your email account. At the moment it only works with Gmail, but support for Outlook is also available, but you do have to sign up to get an invite for access.
If you’re logged into more than one Gmail/Google Apps account, you’ll be prompted to select the account you want to use.
The good news is that if you want to use Kloudless simultaneously with more than one Gmail/Google Apps account – you can. Just simply go through the setup process individually for each account, by logging into that account and clicking on the Kloudless Beta link at the top-right hand corner of the page.
The permissions you are granting Kloudless when it comes to your email address include viewing your email address, viewing and managing your mail, and knowing who you are on Google. That may seem like a lot of data to entrust Kloudless with, not to mention data that you have saved in your cloud storage accounts, but all of your files are encrypted while being transferred using Kloudless, and the service has an extensive Privacy Policy worth reading.
Once your Gmail account is connected, you can then connect your cloud storage account. Currently, Kloudless supports Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.
At this point, Kloudless is fully set up and can be used. But there is one final step that brings an interesting and much welcomed-feature that isn’t available in Cloudy. Since Kloudless allows you to save attachments directly to your cloud storage, the service also offers automation features. You can create rules for how to handle certain attachments. So for example, if you want to save all of the attachments sent to you by a specific person, you can create a rule to copy all of those attachments to a specific Dropbox folder. Rules include copying or moving attachments, based on who they were sent from, who they were sent to, or even based on keywords, and more.
While the automation feature is really cool, it does have its limits. Unfortunately, you can only create up to 10 rules.
If you’d rather not automate the process of saving attachments to your cloud-based storage accounts, you can still access this feature manually when opening individual attachments. When you open an email with an attachment, you’ll find a new option alongside ‘Download.’ Hitting the ‘Copy/Move’ link will open up a pop-up window which gives you access to folders in whichever cloud storage account you’ve connected to.
You can then copy or move individual files, one at a time, directly from your email account to your cloud storage account. If for any reason, space is becoming an issue in your Gmail account, this is a great way to quickly free up space in Gmail by moving large attachments. Even better, if you don’t want to keep the attachments at all but want a record of the email itself, you can also delete individual attachments from your Gmail inbox using Kloudless.
Kloudless is a convenient, handy Chrome extension which will be appreciated by anyone who finds themselves spending more time in the cloud than they do on their desktop. While Cloudy was a step in the right direction, Kloudless completes the equation by providing two-way access to your files saved in the cloud and to attachments in your email account.
What do you think of Kloudless? Let us know in the comments.
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