Outlook.com now lets you save email attachments directly to OneDrive

Microsoft today updated Outlook.com, formerly known as Hotmail, with a new Save to OneDrive feature. As the name implies, you can now save your email attachments directly to the cloud.

Microsoft says this is a feature Outlook.com users “have been asking for.” Some users started to see it show up this past weekend, as first reported by Neowin, and today Microsoft started rolling it out to all Outlook.com users worldwide “over the coming week.”

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Clicking “Save to OneDrive” will add all the attachments in an email to a new OneDrive folder brilliantly called “Email attachments.” If you only want to save an individual attachment, you can do that by clicking on it and then hitting “Save to OneDrive” from the drop-down menu:

Once saved, you can access these files from all your devices via the OneDrive and Office mobile apps. You can of course still save the attachments to your local hard drive by clicking Download, but they will naturally only be available on that device.

Microsoft is late to the party here. Gmail started letting users save attachments to Google Drive back in November 2013.

Still, the company understands why the feature is important:

Before cloud storage became popular, some people would email documents to themselves, because they knew they’d be able to log in to their email account and access those documents from anywhere. People still do this today, however, there is an obvious downside — your inbox can get messy quickly and you have to search through ever-increasing email content until you find what you’re looking for.

There’s still some hassle required now, since you have to remember to save each attachment you may need to access in the future. One day, all email attachments should be saved automatically in a cloud storage service. This isn’t something all users will want, of course, so it should be optional, but I think that’s the next logical step.