How to Send File Attachments with Gmail

With Mail Merge for Gmail, you can add one or more file attachments to your emails. You can:

• Send the same file attachment to all recipients.
• Send different file attachments to different recipients.
• Send unique attachments for each recipient and also attach files that are common to each recipient.

For instance, you may have a common file called brochure.pdf in your Google Drive that should be sent to every recipient of the Mail Merge campaign.

You may also have files like invoice-A.xlsx and invoice-B.xlsx that should be sent to recipients in row #1 and row #2 of the spreadsheet respectively. Thus, both files brochure.pdf and invoice-A.xlsx are sent to recipient A.

Add File Attachments in Gmail

If you are using a Gmail draft as an email template for merge, attach the common files to your draft message itself.

Any files that are attached to the draft message are automatically sent to all recipients of mail merge. This approach is recommended if you have files that should be sent to all recipients of the campaign.

Add Attachments in Google Sheet

Your Mail Merge sheet has a special File Attachments column that is used to determine which attachments should be sent to the email address specified in that row.

This column contains links to your files in Google Drive and you can also add multiple links separated by commas. The Mail Merge app will fetch the corresponding files for each of these links from your Google Drive and attach them to the outgoing email.

Import Files from Google Drive

To attach a file from Google Drive, right-click the file inside Google Drive and choose the Get Link option. Click the Copy Link button on the next screen to copy the shareable link of that file in your clipboard.

Switch to the Google Sheet and paste the link under the File attachments column for the recipient who should receiving this particular file.

tip

If you need to send the same Drive file to other recipients in the sheet, you can simply copy-paste the Drive link in the corresponding File Attachment cells of those rows.

Add Files from Google Sheets

Instead of manually copying and pasting file links from Drive into your Google Sheet, you can directly import files from Drive into the sheet using the File Picker that ships with Mail Merge.

As a first step, select any cell under the File Attachments column of the Google Sheet where the Drive links should be added. Next, go to the Add File Attachments menu and choose Insert Files from Google Drive.

This opens the file picker window where you may select one or more files. Click the Insert button and direct links of these files are automatically added in the sheet.

If you wish to add the file that you just imported to other rows of the sheet, you can simply copy the link and paste in the other cells. This saves them than using the File Picker to import the same file into the Google Sheet.

Upload Files from Computer

If you would like to send the files from your computer as attachments, choose Select files from computer under the Add file attachments menu.

You can now upload one or more file from the computer into the Mail Merge sheet. Internally, the files are uploaded to your Google Drive and then the file links are added to your Google Sheets.

Things to Know

1. The total size of the file attachments should not exceed 10 MB.
2. If you plan to send large files with Mail Merge, upload them to Google Drive and add the file links in your email template.
3. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides cannot be attached to email messages. Mail Merge will automatically convert them to PDF.
4. If you are using a shared Google Drive folder in another account to host your file attachments, make sure that the spreadsheet owner is granted at least view permissions to the folder.