How to download an attachment even if Gmail has blocked it

[Blexfraptor]

Gmail is undoubtedly one of the most used email services in the world. In addition to that Google offers it for free, it has both its web version and its app so we can always have the mail at hand. It also has interesting functions, storage space and security options. One of them is to try to detect any mail that may be dangerous and can infect us with a virus or malware. However, it is a function that can sometimes cause us some problem. Next, we will show how to download an attachment in Gmail even though the service deactivates or blocks this option.

I'm sure that on some occasion you tried to send an attachment in Gmail but the service itself has not allowed it. And is that Gmail, prevents that you can send files of certain types to prevent it can easily spread viruses or malware. However, this does not mean that at some point we receive an email that carries an attachment that is suspicious for Gmail and we want to download it anyway.

In the case where we receive an attachment in Gmail that has been blocked from downloading, the service will show us a message indicating that the file is potentially dangerous and the download of the file is disabled. This is going to make it impossible for us to download the attachment in Gmail, however, it may be dangerous, come from one of our trusted contacts and we want to download it in any case.

So you can download an attachment in Gmail even if it has been blocked
Well, for that we are going to have to follow the steps that we show below. First of all, we will have a mail client installed on our computer. If you have Windows 10 then you will have by default the application of Mail, Mail in the case of using macOS or Thunderbird is also installed by default in most Linux distributions. In any case, the mail client must be configured with a mail account in order to follow the steps shown below.

The first thing we are going to do is open the mail message that has the attached file in Gmail and click on the menu button next to the reply button to select the option Show original. This will open a new window or tab where we have to click on the original Download button and then change the default extension TXT to EML.

With the EML file saved on our PC, the next thing we have to do is open it with our mail client installed on the computer and then right click on the attached file to select the Open or Save option. Now we should be able to download the attachment in Gmail that we could not save from the Google service.