Knowledge base
Files
Every attachment this mailbox holds, in one place you can search, download and clear out.
Details
- Attachments have always lived in storage scoped to the mailbox they arrived at. What did not exist was any way to ask a question about them. A bucket lists keys and knows nothing about names, sizes, or which message used a file. Files is that index: search by name, filter by kind, see what each one weighs, and open the message it came on.
- Mail you SEND is kept too, which it was not before. Sent attachments were previously recorded as names with no bytes behind them, so downloading one produced an empty file rather than an error. The half of “my files” people most often go looking for was unreachable. It covers every mailbox and every message in it, sent and received alike.
- Deleting is for files you uploaded. A received or sent file stays with the message it came on, and so does an upload that went out as a download link that still works or is attached to a message that has not gone out yet. Pick one upload or several and delete them together. Deleting removes the bytes and keeps the row, so Files knows the difference between a file that was deleted and one that never existed.
- On a shared mailbox you see files that arrived at the addresses you reach, the same boundary the thread list uses: the ones shared with you, or all of them when your role reaches every address. Files have permissions of their own: reading needs files:read, and uploading, deleting and publishing links need files:write. Reading an email still reads the attachments on it, and somebody limited to some addresses uploads to the first one they can send from.
- There is no backfill. Files lists what arrives from the day the index shipped, so an established mailbox starts empty and fills as mail comes in; older attachments are still on their messages and still download from there.
- Received and sent files are counted but not capped. Uploads are capped at 100 MB a file and 500 an hour, and a workspace keeps as many as its plan allows, from 10 GB on Free to 1 TB on Enterprise. The total on the page is the bytes actually held, attachments included, which is what makes it the first honest storage number in the product.
- The same index is on the REST API, the SDK and the MCP server: search it, filter it by kind, direction, address and date, sort it, read one file, download its bytes, see the download links it went out as, publish it at a public link or revoke one, read its totals, upload to it, and delete one upload or many at once. A key limited to some addresses sees only the files that arrived at them.
- The Analytics tab totals what the files take up, received, sent and uploaded, counts the downloads of links that still work, and charts the files added over the last 30 days, by type and by address. Deleted files are left out, and a member counts only the addresses they can read.
Google Workspace
Fastmail