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It would be interesting to understand the amount of bandwidth required to service a front page post in 24 hours historically and compared to today

now we find netflix is serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance...

regards

John Jones

https://john.jones.name

There is a solution: Use S/MIME. This is the email encryption standard supported by all major mail clients without need for plugins. It can even work with web-based gmail using a firefox addon: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-smime/gmail-smime.html

You can create your own certificates or get free certificates from places like Comodo.

One quirk of S/MIME is that the subject line is not encrypted. This is a good place to add the text "India can suck my beef jerky" to every encrypted message.

His complaint is rubbish. You can already use greasemonkey to do what he wants as far as replacing the browsers scripts. Remember that javascript is plain text in the first place so it is basically open source so you can easily write a free client to gmail if you want to. BTW. there is already a gmail based fuse filesystem out there.

I have the greatest respect for the things RMS has achieved in the past, but he needs to retire from the public eye now. He just isn't in touch with modern technology anymore.

I can see this becoming a popular filesharing tool; I can see myself and some online friends sharing a google account for the sake of making a free high-speed dump to replace private FTP sites, Rapidshare links etc.

There is 'gmailfs' which allows you to mount your Gmail share as a local directory. It is apparently not fully secure as it stores your password as text on your system, but well...

I know that it is available for Linux systems, though I have never been able to fully get it to work.

Here is theLinux link.

Here is a link to a Windows Port.

It's not a "one-touch" solution, but what is? I has the potential to be a great deal more than just your average backup.

GmailFS might be an option, too.
Wikipedia concludes that it "should not be considered reliable for backup purposes", though.

Already done - http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html

use firefox, or go out more often, that could be even better :)

Go create some throwaway accounts and use GmailFS.

Hmmm... I just did a Google search and found FireGPG and Gmail S/MIME. FireGPG looks like what I want, although both are missing drafts support. That is, GMail autosaves drafts, and the proper thing to do, if possible, would be to encrypt the draft addressed to the user, but FireGPG ignores this problem (for now) and Gmail S/MIME disables autosaving entirely (for now). I will setup FireGPG and see how it works.

Probably this FUSE filesystem is what you were talking about. I've heard about it but never used it.

Also, there's apparently a Firefox extension that works similarly, for all those non-linux users.

Right here!

I've been using the S/MIME plugin for Firefox. and it's great. I'm not sure I like the way you have to apply for a certificate from Thawte, but it works and it's very painless.

This is not painless and easy, and IMHO S/MIME is alot nicer implemented than PGP signatures.

GmailFS should also now be easily supported on Mac OS X using MacFuse.

I had a quick look the other day for something like Blat on Linux that does all the tedious stuff (supports domain logins and all that Windows wank) and came up with sweet nothing.

Anyone know of this? The source could be used to provide something like the Gmail Filesystem.

No no, use http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html
Much easier way to do this. Still not a good idea, but at least a better implementation.

Believe it or not - there's actually a gmail file system.

What?! No review of Gmail Filesystem?

Even cheaper -- and also "from Google's Book"
GmailFS and FUSE

-----------
Get 10^91 or so free GMail accounts for googolbytes of free storage!

S/MIME is the answer my friend.. There is an extension for encrypting emails directly in Gmail.

http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-smime /gmail-smime.html

Check out this little thingie, brought to us by Richard Jones, who previously grought us GmailFS and other so cool hacks. This is the shit.

What you need is Linux and GmailFS. Get a few accounts and you are set.

-matthew

How is this news? You can long ago access google "storage service" on *nix and on windows

This project stemmed the GMail Drive shell extension, which effectivly intergrates the same method of using gmail's storage into Windows.

GmailFS seems to provide a Google-oriented storage solution for anything that supports FUSE-based filesystems.

Total overkill. Here is how to get a 250 Gb Raid 10 storange free of charge 1: Get 125 Gmail accounts 2: Get Google filestem 3: Job done

First of all, iSync ought to be able to sync your computers directly without going through a central server. Apple's crippling of that functionality is nothing more than them being greedy bastards.

Second, I suppose you've never heard of GmailFS, have you?

You do know about GmailFS, right? There was a Slashdot article long ago about it; it's quite good.

The biggest reason I use GMail...well, 2 reasons...and they're pretty big...

1) They let me use POP3...I know fastmail.fm does too, but they make you go in and delete spam through their web interface....and not to mention they don't give as much storage space...

2) Gmail Filesystem...

There are of course other benefits to GMail over other "free" e-mail services...Spam protection, Virus protection, they let you forward messages for other addresses through their service, etc...

As far as it being Beta ... Google's search became popular while it was still in beta...it doesn't really mean much that GMail is still in beta...I'll pull a page from this guys book... "How many of you were using FireFox as your primary browser before it hit 1.0? Raise your hand..."

Then again this is exactly the reason why GMail is still in beta...Google is smart about making sure things work before they take them out of beta...

There is already an app called Gmail Filesystem that lets you use a gmail account as a drive. It's implemented in python so it shouldn't be difficult to modify it to do what you suggest.

Gmail Filesystem

They've already released their filesystem: GmailFS.

I can't fill up my 2 gigs on Gmail, nor my gig on Y! mail, why in the world would I need 30 gigs?

Maybe you need to use the Google Filesystem then...

Something like... GmailFS?

Maybe try this firefox extension: Gmail S/MIME I have not tried yet - was googling for greasemonkey + gpg + gmail. Should be possible to use same trick and get enigMAIL (currently works only on thunderbird or mozilla mail) to encrypt most any web based email.

It's a filesystem: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html

I'm planning to use it to host my imap folders for my squirrelmail server.

There are a few hacks like Gmail Drive and Gmail filesystem that make GMail act like a single file system.

Why not use gmailfs too: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html

Somebody has done it, sort of. GmailFS is a mountable Linux filesystem that uses Gmail as a storage medium.

BTW this reminds me of this thing i found that lets you use a g-mail account as a virtual hard drive.

These? GmailFS (for Linux) and GMail Drive (for Windows).

RAID 1??

I'm no tech wonderboy but what the hell happened to RAID 1??

Or hell, RAID 10 (RAID 1 with redundent controlers?). To hell with all that even... why not go with a script that just dumps EVERYTING over the net to a backup distributed server?

All this mess of backing up. Sheesh. Gmail GIVES you 2 gigs of free space. Why not link a few hundred gmail accounts together and a script to link them all together useing GmailFS to make it store it? (Note: is all a functional wonderment, not a production based idea.)

Gmail Filesystem

You can even mount your gmail "drive", then drag-n-drop files into it. when you go on http://www.gmail.com/, you can see them in the trash with a special title, so they don't mess your mailbox up.
Go here for a windows version and here for a Linux version

(Yeah, I need these karma points !)

Wonder if the fellow who wrote the Gmail File System will do an adaptation...

...that noone mentioned gmailfs http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html ...it's a mountable linux filesystem that uses gmail as the storage medium. It works quite well..at times google breaks it, but the authors (so far) have been pretty quick to fix as it's usually a small change, like formatting for example.

If you use this for sensitive data, id recommend encrypting the file first.
Another plus, is you can actually RUN programs from gmailfs...and yet another added bonus...when googles gmail bot searches through your mailbox to gather ad targeting data..they'll be fed a bunch of garbage..and yes you can still use it for normal emails.

Back up your data off site on GmailFS.

Win32 Version

*nix version

there is a bad space in the supplied url, try: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html

re: folders

I doubt that folders (in the current sense that you have pop or imap folders) will be implemented. Gmail seems to have adopted a system that is different and possibly better in their use of labels. I'm not convinced one way or the other, but labels allows you to have pretty much the same abilities as you do with folders, and it works into their paradigm (mail is never deleted) really well.

Imap and retrieval from other accounts would be a big plus though. Of course, being able to run RAID with gmailfs would be nice as well :)

Time to start work on HoTMaiL file system, but we need 4 HoTMaiL account for 1GB filesystem
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html/

I can also see that if people knew more about how Gmail worked there would be more people using it to store files etc

I belive this is already being done:

http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html