Attachment File Names in Zaps

[AlliAlosa]

Hi There!

Whenever I use Zapier to send an attachment (via Gmail) from Airtable, it adds a whole bunch of junk characters to the front of the file name. For example, the file name with in Airtable is “TRAVEL_REQUEST_FORM.pdf”, and when it’s emailed, it turns into “YMItjNLbSTKMP00w4iiQ_TRAVEL_REQUEST_FORM.pdf”

At first I thought it was adding the Record ID to the file name, but it’s definitely not the Record ID. All attachments have a different string of characters added. Is there any way to prevent this?

[openside]

Hi Neads, when files get uploaded into Airtable, they receive that naming convention as a way to make sure every file is named uniquely. If you wish to change the name of the attachment, you could use a service like convertcloud to do that, but would add an extra step and api call. Not sure if worth it but possible.

[Murilo_Rodrigue]

I’m having the same trouble. I need filenames to be kept as they are in Airtable when send by mail in Gmail through a Zapier zap, but it comes out as something totally different.

[AlliAlosa]

I’ve found a couple workarounds for this, but I don’t love any of them. Hopefully Airtable or Zapier will eventually allow the option to change the file or name or keep it as it originally was. But in the mean time…

Along the lines of what @openside suggested, this post mentions using DropBox to rename the files. You could add DropBox as a step to your Zap, upload a file, change the name, then attach it to your email. This doesn’t really work in my case as I have several attachments per email and don’t want to waste the extra steps to do each one, but if you only have one attachment, it should work perfectly.

What I ended up doing just this morning, especially since Airtable changed the way attachments are handled last week (hoping that gets fixed soon), is adding the URL for each attachment in the body of the email. That’s working best for me!

[jowan_qupty]

Another solution would be to use Integromat.
The Gmail module allows you to name your attachments before sending them, so you can simply give it the same naming convention as you do within Airtable (ie. {IDNumber}_{CustomerName}).

Strange to see that Zapier doesn’t have this option as it’s clear that the Gmail API does allow you to do this.