Add SkyDrive Attachments to Gmail with Attachments.me

It's been a few years since Dropbox took cloud storage mainstream, but the service is still being billed as a way to bypass the email attachment file-size limit.

"Well, whatever gets people to sign up," Microsoft seems to be thinking. Microsoft has been opening up the SkyDrive API to make it easier for other apps and sites to integrate functionality.

Particularly, the file picker API, which enables users to upload files directly to SkyDrive, has been seeing big improvements. These improvements should make it easier to upload more types of files from more places.

To showcase the new functionality, Microsoft is highlighting the API's use in Attachments.me.

The service, as the name implies, makes it easy to attach cloud files to emails.

It works with Gmail as the email service and Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive and now SkyDrive as storage providers.

"Using Attachments.me’s Chrome extension, you can now send and access SkyDrive files directly in Gmail," Microsoft wrote.

"Additionally, you can create rules to automatically save certain attachments to SkyDrive (e.g. 'whenever John Doe sends me an attachment, save it to my 'Files from John' folder in SkyDrive')," it said.

"We think this will be a pretty compelling integration for people that want to use SkyDrive but are still using Gmail," it added about the poor saps still stuck with Gmail.

Using SkyDrive with Attachments.me is just as easy as with all of the other supported services. If you don't have the browser extension yet, you need to grab it, link it to your Google account, link your SkyDrive, Dropbox, etc. accounts and you're done.

You'll then be able to send attachments to the cloud storage services, even set up automatic rules for it, or use cloud storage to share large files via email.