How to open attachments without downloading them We'll show you how to open or preview attachments in Gmail for desktop and mobile.

Gmail gets a proper PDF viewer Gmail gets a handy update that lets you open PDFs using the Google Docs viewer. Gone is the option to open them up in HTML, but this is a good thing.

To start, open the Gmail website and enter your Gmail account using your valid credentials. After that, open up an email you want to save as PDF.

What files can you open in Gmail? Depending on which platform you use with Gmail, you can open a range of attachments without downloading them. However, you can't open some attachment types.