I’ve never been a big fan of mail applications. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve tried them all. Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, even a little known one called Incredimail (just because my boss at an old job was obsessed with it for awhile). While I don’t doubt that they’re effective for some people, I’ve just never found them to be something worth taking the time to use. As a result, all of my mail comes to me through Gmail.

Recently, I discovered that I was missing out on a core functionality of Microsoft SkyDrive being part of my cloud computing arsenal. If I had files on SkyDrive and wanted to email them to someone, I would have to go to SkyDrive, download the file, go back to my email, email it, and then delete the file on my computer if I didn’t want it there. Now, I’m used to doing sequences of events and jumping through various hoops and things when it comes to tech; that’s just a fact of the way things work. For instance, in order to get my site’s blog to crosspost to everywhere I want it to (LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Blogger, and sometimes the Journal functions on art sites I’m a part of, if the blog is relevant), I spend the time writing the post., then I have to copy the HTML and edit it individually for reposting to all the places I want it to go, then navigate to each site individually and put up the post. Even the one that’s an automatic crossposter (Blogger to LiveJournal) has to be edited on LiveJournal’s end because the HTML code for images and links doesn’t translate in the crossposting.

No wonder I don’t blog that often.

However, this semi-long introduction is all to explain that I’m used to doing things in strange ways in order to make the web, and tech in general, perform the way I want it to; so, I have thought nothing of the royal run-around I had to perform in order to email someone something that I had stored in the cloud on SkyDrive. Then a friend of mine with Outlook laughed at me. Microsoft Outlook has SkyDrive integrated. For that person, sending an email with a SkyDrive-based attachment is just as simple as sending any other attachment. I was frustrated, but I was not about to switch from web-based mail to yet another program just for one feature.

Now, thanks to Attachments.me’s new Chrome and Firefox browser extension, emailing SkyDrive based attachments is just as simple for me as it is for my mocking friend with Outlook. Once the plugin is installed, files in the SkyDrive cloud are a couple of clicks away from being easily attached to email from within Gmail itself. As an added bonus, the extensions allow users to create rules that will store attachments in SkyDrive as they come into your inbox – no clicking required! Now if only Google would provide the same integration with Google Drive.

Check out and download the extension for Chrome or Firefox from the link below.

Attachments.me + SkyDrive homepage

[via Engadget]