Gmail is one of the most popular email services in use today. It’s used for home users and well as for business email accounts. If you have a Google account or an Android smartphone, then you have a Gmail account as well.
When you have an email that you want to share with other people, you can forward it to them as an option, assuming you have their email address. But if you do not have their email address and are maybe participating in a Zoom meeting or using an instant messaging app, you can easily share an email using a URL (link) so that anyone with the link can view the message.
To do this, we will be using a free browser extension called Share Emails via URL by CloudHQ who provide many extensions and addons that can be used for Chrome, Edge and Gmail. Many of these tools require you to create a free CloudHQ account so keep that in mind. Once you install the extension in your browser, you will see a new icon in the sidebar when you go to the Gmail website.
To create a shareable link to an email in Gmail, simply open the email you wish to share and then click on the Share Emails via URL icon.
A new window will appear with a button that says Create Shareable URL Link.
Once you click this button, you will then see another button that says Share the link.
If you click on the Go to dashboard button, you will be shown other emails that you have shared using this extension as well as have options to view other addons and extensions from CloudHQ that you have installed.
After clicking on the Share the link button, you will then see how the shared email will look and if there are any attachments, they will be shown as links that the people you send it to can click on to download. You can then click on the Copy to clipboard button to copy the link. Then you can paste it into an email, document, messaging app and so on.
Clicking on the Settings button will show you some options that you would have if you used the premium version of the addon.
The image below shows how the shared email will look when the link is clicked on. As you can see, it will open the email in a web browser window and any text, links, or images will be displayed just like they were in the original email. It also shows who has shared the email. Any attachments will be shown in the attachments section. The recipients can then click on the Copy to clipboard button to copy the URL if they want to share it with other people.
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