A surprising amount of the reading that matters arrives as an attachment. The contract redline, the quarterly deck, the signed PDF, the consultant's report - they land in your inbox, and the usual AI workflow for them is clumsy: download the file, find it in your Downloads folder, upload it into a chat tool, ask your question, and hope you grabbed the right version.
Since Sidenote 2.19 and 2.20, that whole detour is gone. Open the email in Gmail or Outlook on the web, open the side panel, and read the attachment where it already is - with every answer cited back to the exact passage.
What "reading an attachment in place" means
Sidenote is a browser extension, so it works on the page you already have open, in the session you're already signed in to. When that page is a Gmail or Outlook message, the panel offers:
- The email itself. Long thread, dense update, a decision buried in paragraph six - summarize it or ask questions directly.
- Each readable attachment. PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoint decks attached to the open message, read without downloading them first.
There's no upload step because there's no upload. The file is fetched through your own signed-in session, the same way your browser would fetch it if you clicked download - except it goes straight into the reading panel instead of your Downloads folder.
Why this beats download-and-re-upload
Fewer wrong-version accidents. The file you read is the file on the email - not whichever similarly-named copy you grabbed from Downloads.
Behind-login files just work. The attachment lives inside your mailbox. Tools that need a public link or an upload can't reach it; a reader that works in your session can.
Scanned attachments included. A signed contract that comes back as a scan is an image of text, not text. Sidenote runs OCR on scanned PDFs (paid plans), so even those become readable and citable.
Answers you can check. Every claim in a summary or chat answer carries a citation. Click it and the document scrolls to the exact sentence and highlights it - claims that can't be matched to a real passage are dropped before you see them. For a contract clause or a number you'll act on, that click is the difference between "sounds right" and "is right".
Gmail vs Outlook: what's different
Gmail needs no connector. Sidenote reads the open message and its attachments through your signed-in Gmail session directly. Open the message, open the panel, pick the attachment.
Outlook uses the Microsoft connection. The same read-only Microsoft connection that covers SharePoint and OneDrive now covers Outlook mail. The first time you read from Outlook, you'll connect (or reconnect) Microsoft; access is read-only, scoped to the message you have open, and nothing scans your mailbox in the background. If you connected Microsoft before mail support shipped, reconnect once from the Connections page to grant the added scope - the connections guide walks through it.
What about the rest of the email workflow?
Once an attachment is in Sidenote it behaves like any other document: it joins your library, you can add it to a collection next to the related spec or the previous quarter's deck and ask questions across them, build a glossary of its jargon, or turn its summary into a share link for someone who just needs the gist.
That's the practical shape of it: the inbox stops being a dead end where documents go to be forgotten, and becomes one more surface Sidenote reads - with receipts.