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GMail Drive Shell Extension
krmpradeep writes "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. 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. 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."
I've been meaning to impliment something like this in OS X, but GmailFS uses FUSE, which is Linux only. I wonder how he did this for Windows.
Jeeze, pretty amazing. Downloaded the filed, installed it, and was transferring files in less than 60 seconds. No kidding! Files transfer faster than when I email the same sized attachment which is pretty nice. When you click/double-click on the drive it opens like any other drive/folder window and you see the files that are stored there. A free gig of off-site storage. I haven't tried to transfer something bigger than the 10MB attachment limit yet, but I will give it a shot. A great app!
http://www.busyweather.com/
It definitely works, but will probably be made not to work as soon as Google hears of it and you know they read /.
Still its a cool idea and honestly I would pay a very small fee (as in no more than $2/month) to have a 1GB online drive that was dependable. But I always have my little Sandisk MiniCruzer 512MB so its not like I really need it.
But would you trust it? Would you REALLY want to use a hack on top of something that somebody else provided for free for your mission-critical data?
Neither did I. What I don't get is the advantage. I mean, using no-ip.com and your average DSL account, you can turn your home computer into an "online storage" at a cost of around around $0.50 per gigabyte.
Wow. Those google guys are sure being nice! I mean, you gotta love these people, right?
For a community that seems to love google, this sure seems like a stupid, wasteful, and mean thing to do.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
okay, so how does google respond to this.
I think they just have to throw their hands up and go, okay, fine 1GB virtual drive for ppl, how to best make money off of it?
Could they analyze your files and serve ads related to it? If you put up an mp3, could they upsell albums related to it?
If you upload a text document describing to your girlfriend your favorite lingerie, could they flash an adsense for Victoria's Secret?
If you have an excel spread sheet describing mission-critical CRMs, could they analyze those and start throwing ads related to that?
Philosophistry
I tried it. I added it to /etc/fstab (not automounting). I never use it. Why? Simple. It takes to flipping long. When I was all excited and playing around with it, I stuck a text file that said "Hello World" on it. I did an "ls". 30 seconds later I got the response from "ls". I then catted the file. Again, at least 30 seconds before it came back with anything. It is incredibly horribly slow - and this was with a recent version. (1-2 weeks ago)
I don't see how this is "news" at all - this has been around pretty much since Gmail went beta.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
This is a really cool hack, and has a great "Gee whiz look what I did" value to it. But that's about it. I don't think that it would be practical to start actually using this cool little hack due to the fact that no matter how much you may disagree with the GMail terms of use, they still reserve the right to either
A) make it so that this hack no longer works (wouldn't be too hard, in fact it will probably break often as GMail is still in beta and under heavy development if you havent noticed)
or,
B) simply close your account, no questions asked (don't think that people using this hack wont be EASY to detect to to a profoundly different traffic fingerprint in their logfiles for the GmailFS using accounts).
I'm not saying you're "bad" or "taking advantage of google" if you use this software per se, what I'm saying is, don't complain when the Gmail account you've filled to the brim with Bangbus videos get's abruptly cancelled.
My suggestion, for what it's worth, would be: enjoy this for what it is: a cool, neat-o, nifty hack. Period.
Here in Germany we have a free mail provider (GMX) that offers 1 GB (since a few months), for mails AND for files, and you can access them as a file system(link to German site) using the open WebDAV protocol from linux, windows or mac, so no ugly hacks are neccesary. (Konqueror can do that out-of-the-box, I think)
Also offers free pop and smtp, mail forwarding, and configurable filters
Interface is in German only, and you have to give them an existing German, Austrian or Swiss postal address when you sign up. (but those could theoretically be found on the net.)