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GMail Drive: HOW-TO make use of 2gb

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

There's some hype going on about gmail. Since 1st April, the nice ppl of google increased gmail's free storage to a whopping 2gb! beating the closest competitor by at least a double. The best thing is, it's still going up! I doubt I'll fully untilised the allocated 2gb... yet. However, with this new software, things might change. It's called the gmail Drive.

What is gmail drive?
gmail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google gmail account, allowing you to use gmail as a storage medium.

How does it work?
gmail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google gmail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your gmail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. Sweet!

What does it do?
gmail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

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This is good since we now have infinity storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. Hence, with gmail Drive you can easily copy files to your gmail account and retrieve them again. When you create a new file using gmail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account.

The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. gmail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the gmail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures.

In short, gmail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer. You can copy files to and from the gmail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Here's the downside though, because the gmail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in gmail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the gmailFS letters) to your archived mail folder.

Another is that the gmail Drive is still an experimental tool. There are still a number of limitations of the file-system, such as total filename size must be less than 40 characters, and it doesn't make full use of the secure internet protocols available. Nevertheless, this tool is good enough to help you fully utilise your gmail.

BTW, it's FREE. Enjoy!

Click Here! to download.
posted by Ivan, 10:57 am

4 Comments:

That's useful!
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 4/05/2005 11:41:00 am

 

it is not released by google, well it is useful.
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 4/05/2005 11:50:00 am

 

How nice if we can download attachments of friends' forwarded mail using it~ :/
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 4/05/2005 12:02:00 pm

 

ashie: yeah.. it's a 'homebrewed' software. well it looks promising. if google were to pick it up, think of the things that users will be able to benefit from.
LcF: hey.. that will be really cool. i think that's possible IF your email subject starts with gmailFS.
commented by Blogger Ivan, 4/06/2005 10:06:00 am

 

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