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."

Comments

I wonder if they'll try to license Mac

[ebooher]

Makes me wonder if they will try to license the Apple iDisk format for this as well for Mac users. I wouldn't mind having a 1 Gig internet drive to access files from home, work, and school without the need to carry DVD's around.

For Linux too!

[x4A6D74]

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

Haven't tried it yet; I keep meaning to but school keeps getting in the way.

Re:For Linux too!

[Hobadee]

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.

Nice, but doomed

[BristolCream]

This won't last long. One of the reaosns Google and others can offer so much space is that they're confident that it won't be used.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[polecat_redux]

This won't last long.

They may have tolerated the concept if it had remained within the realm of Linux, but now that the Windows floodgates are open, I suspect that they will put an end to this very quickly.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[Sneeper]

Actually Gmail *does* have a file size limit to incoming e-mails. As one person on the GMAIL Drive Forums states:

It appears that Google has put a file size limit on "attachments". I've installed GMail Drive and tried a couple quick uploads. One was a tar.bz2 file that weighs in at 23MB. After dragging the file over to the GMail Drive window, it worked for a while then returned an error message stating that "File is too big. GMail does currently not support files larger than 10 Mb."

The response confirms:

Great point Steve. GMail does have an attachment size limit which does limit the usefulness of these file system extensions. One solution would be to handle file splitting in the tool.

I don't have a gmail account, but anyone who does should be able to easily confirm this.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[jeffb]

I wouldn't hedge my bets. It is, after all Google -- they have a lot of machines (worldwide), networked together by a solid infrastructure (that many of us could only dream of) and all other things considered, disk space is pretty inexpensive.

Then again, even though there may be no problem with everyone fully utilizing the space that's available, Google may take offence at you violating their TOS in order to do so. :)

Re:Nice, but doomed

[wibs]

yup, 10MB max attachment size. the help page for attachments also mentions that the encoding is so bloated that attachments of 6MB might hit the size limit, too (alright, they didn't use the word "bloated" but it seems a little absurd to me).

Re:Nice, but doomed

[PayPaI]

No, it's not really absurd. Base-64 encoding increases file size by something like 3/2. If you do not use base-64 encoding, then your files may become corrupted in transit.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[eMartin]

They might have even tolerrated the few Windows users that would actually use it, but now that the Slashdot floodgates are open...

Re:Nice, but doomed

[Anonymous Coward]

A byte is technically 0-255, and base-64 basically utilizes 6 out of 8 bits of the byte. (0-63, only using A-Z,a-z,0-9,and two others)
Therefore anything base-64 encoded will be exactly 25% larger than it not.
I don't see why they can't store the files as a binary attachment to the e-mail, instead of storing the data inside the e-mail as text, however.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[strider44]

actually I think the volume of people who would actually use this is larger in linux!

Re:Nice, but doomed

[Alioth]

It'll last plenty of time.

It's impractical to use much of this storage unless you have an OC-45 to hand. The vast majority of people have internet connections with pathetic upstream bandwidth (128K, 256K - occasionally 512K - and very rarely more than that). It'll be fabulous for storing small files you want easy access to from anywhere, but pretty useless for storing large files or large quantities of small files simply due to the time it'll take to upload/download the files.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[polecat_redux]

people tend to view OS bashing as flamebait around here, especially when it really isn't factual or called for.)

I wasn't bashing Linux (I use it myself). In fact, I was simply pointing out that far less people use Linux (in a home-user context) than Windows - something that is entirely factual. Linux does not possess anywhere near the market share of Windows. This is the reason usage of that app would be more widespread... plain and simply, more exposure.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[anthony_dipierro]

disk space is pretty inexpensive

Disk space is pretty inexpensive, but the kind of bandwidth this filessystem will likely use isn't. I'm sure google is already spending more on bandwidth than hard drive space. With people transferring all these files without even looking at an ad, it's bound to cost them a lot of money.

Huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Works as advertised

[erick99]

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!

Re:Works as advertised

[erick99]

10MB limit applies. Oh well, still very cool.

Re:Works as advertised

[ebooher]

While I will admit that the concept of having a drive on your desktop that lives somewhere other than your local machine is neat, it isn't really a stretch of the technology, is it?

I mean, Apple has had iDisk since even before Mac OS X came out on the scene, I was using it to keep my documents synced at school when I was still using Mac OS 8 (I think.... may have been early 9)

Also, I *know* there was another "freebie" website a couple of years ago that did something very similar that allowed you to connect to their storage via a drive icon in My Computer on Windows.

And we won't even start on *NIX networked file systems ..... But I think this is going to be a very big gotcha for the service. It will really get some crazy attention now. However, I hope earlier /. posts I saw about "How soon before script kiddies and pirates use this as file repositories" don't start immediately coming true. Kill it before it even starts.

It came out, has thousands of members

[zaxios]

and now it's being manipulated with third party tools. Is Gmail going to live its entire life in Beta?

Re:It came out, has thousands of members

[lpontiac]

Probably. Google News is still labeled "beta".

Re:It came out, has thousands of members

[generic-man]

Lawyers have said that Google News can never be run for profit, not that it must remain in "lawyer-induced beta" like that headline claims. Google News qualifies for Fair Use provisions as long as it is not a for-profit entity. It doesn't matter whether you call it "alpha," "beta," or "Suzy." Google News cannot make money; its entire purpose is to copy little samples of images and news from other companies' web sites.

Now if you want to start syndicating Google News yourself, Google has some news for you.

It Works

[Facekhan]

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.

Re:It Works

[killbill!]

GMX.net has had 1GB (file storage & e-mail) over WebDAV for free for a while now.
If you have a German or Austrian bank account, you can bump that to 5GB for 3 EUR a month or 10GB for 5 EUR a month.

Btw the features of their email service just flat out rock. I'm quite sure they are unmatched worldwide. ('been a customer since 98 now ;))

(I knew all those years learning German in high school weren't a waste of time ;p... Now then, how about you guys give us back the English version you had earlier?)

Cool hack...

[mcrbids]

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.

Interesting

[Timesprout]

that Google are doing more towards making the network the computer than companies like SUN and Oracle who have been banging on about it for years now but actually achieved nothing.

I can see it now...

[MajorG17]

Just wait until someone invites themself for 120 GMail addresses... then 1000... then starts SHARING terabytes of copyrighted data... eah, this may not last long.

I'm amused.

[Awptimus Prime]

I'm having a great time reading this thread. The same people who say things like "I would never run IE" are coming out and acting thrilled about this. What about the requirement of having IE to run this? I guess it is okay when it has something to do with Gmail. Hmmmm.

Selective zealotry at its worse.

Don't be evil

[philipkd]

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?

So is it a filesystem?

[Chris Hall]

I've not got a gmail account, so I can't easily try it and see for myself how it behaves, but the descriptions are rather confusing.

On one hand, it says that it "creates a virtual filesystem", that it "literally adds a new drive", and that it "acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer".

But then elsewhere, it says that it "is a Shell Namespace Extension", and the only usage examples given all require the use of explorer.exe, which suggest that it's not implemented a full filesystem after all.

So which is it?

• Does it implement a new local drive, from which files can be accessed using any existing program?
• Or does it implement a new network drive, so that at least UNC-aware programs will work?
• Or is it really restricted to force the use of explorer (or other shell-api-using tools) for file manipulation?

Even if it is restricted in this way, it still seems a worthy project -- but wouldn't it be fairer to warn people first? Or if it's not restricted, how about documenting the ability to e.g. save files directly there from any program?

yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

excite was doing that back in '99. only offered 100 meg, but drives were a lot smaller then and you could setup multiple accounts

on a slightly more paranoid note

how many people are actually going to put their gmail passwords into an app like this and HOPE it doesn't forward them (or contact lists) back to some spammer

post the source and maybe...

don't even get me started talking about the possiblities for using this type of util as a spam gateway

Abusing Google?

[adolfojp]

GMail is an excellent web mail service. In fact, it is the best one that I have ever used. They pay for the service and make a profit by pasting ads on their webmail site.

If we use GMail in this fashion, not only are we abusing their trust but also dooming the service and perhaps destroying it.


Cheers,

Adolfo

Re:Abusing Google?

[ender81b]

O Noes! What ever will the billionaires do!

Pardon me if I don't really care how a company's business model depends on how I use their product.

Re:Abusing Google?

[rta]

You're probably one of those people who thinks that downloading mp3s without paying for them is stealing. Don't you understand that by not paying for the music you actually help the musicians make money by fighting against the record companies?! Oh, also you buy more music as a result.

This is the same thing. With gmail, google is further tightening their grip on the disk market. Since google has been on the scene the price per gig has dropped by 80%! Manufacturers are suffering. Once google's stranglehold is broken, hard drive artisans will be able to sell reliable networked storage directly to the consumer at a reasonable price and still be able to earn a living wage.

Re:Abusing Google?

[Illserve]

You'll care if they start charging you for it.

Re:What about the ToS?

[julesh]

Google don't take full rights to your e-mail. You're thinking of hotmail.

For Slashdot Too!

[goombah99]

Slashdot-Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Slashdot login, allowing you to use Slashdot as a storage medium. Slashdot-Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Slashdot account using a combination of the read-write Journal pages and the unlimited write-once comment fields. Slashdot-drive enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Slashdot account directly from inside Windows Explorer. Slashdot-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.

It offers high availability, and unlimited amounts of file storage.

Slashdot-drive uses hundreds of slash-dot logins mappens in a raid-0/raid-1 fashion to assure low latency and redundancy in case you are discovered. In the event an account is locked or deleted, SLASHDOT drive automaticaly rebuilds lost raid partiions in new accounts.

Data is stored in ascii-mapping or using the optional stealth-mode which decreaces storage density but improves undetectability by using phrases taken from other posts to encode a data stream,

The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish and causing OSDN to bear unacceptable server costs. But who cares becaue you are an arrogant prick

Re:For Slashdot Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish"

And this makes a difference how exactly?

(take this post I've just made for an example)

Re:For Slashdot Too!

[Anonymous Coward]

> GMail isn't a "public good", it's a marketing
> gimmick created by a company trying to get
> market share.

Tell that to the tens of thousands of people who already depend on gMail as their primary email. What are they called again? Oh yes, the "public." And would you say they regard a huge free email account as something "bad" or something "good"?

There are so many companies who do bad things right and left, and that deserve to get kicked in the teeth. Google continually offers innovative projects that vastly improve the public good; why spend energy kicking them in the teeth, too?

On another matter, the original post about a Slashdot drive was the funniest and most insightful post I've read here in months.

Re:Web Server

[hobo2k]

Those crazy guys at google have already done the work for you! Your gmail network drive can be accessed through the web at gmail.google.com!!

The Hell...

[Rie Beam]

Look. Go down to Circuit City, and buy a 60GB Western Digital hard drive. Now leave the computer on when you go out, and setup some sort of SSH program - problem solved. If you have to rely upon an e-mail service for backing up important documents, someone should have removed you from the gene pool many, many years ago. Sheesh.

Nice hack, but you get what you pay for!

[siliconjunkie]

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.

others already offer this without hack

[F�an�ro]

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.)

Are you sure?

[Gothic_Walrus]

I can fully understand the decision if Google decides to crack down on this. On the other hand, stopping the project would be a very bad PR move. After all, it would violate some of the things that Google has found to be true...

• Democracy on the web works.
• -- Democracy is rule of the people, right? If the people want this function, why take it away?
• You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer.
• -- Obvious. This would make it much easier to access files and to transfer from one machine to another.
• There's always more information out there.
• -- Easier access to files that you've created.
• The need for information crosses all borders.
• -- Self explanatory. The information that can be gained by this tool should outweigh Google's need for storage space, supposedly.
• Great just isn't good enough.
• -- GMail is great. It can be better if Google allows this.

Besides...wouldn't this be a case of Google being evil? We know that they can't do that...

If it is possible, some programmer will do it.

[Futurepower(R)]

"Interesante (Score:0, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on 12:04 AM -- Saturday October 09 2004 (#10477597)
Wow, thats pretty neat."

How can that be a troll? É interesante, acordo. It's just a first post. Over-rated maybe, but not a troll.

It is neat. It proves the old adage, which I just invented: If it is possible, some programmer will do it.

I'm interested in the sociology of this. Is it possible that the executives at Google did not realize that they were offering a free place to put backups of encrypted files?

That's a suggestion for the Google file system shell. There should be automatic encryption, using a locally stored password. Didn't the Google executives realize that most of the data will not be useful to them, because it will be encrypted? I hope I never see a Google ad for Ö|tè&~1}¥bkä40e)Æ&#243 ;G.

For many people, safe storage is much more interesting than yet another email account. Of course, everything in the entire world should be free, not just information.

--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

Actually,

[acariquara]

I believe most files posted would be modded at least +3, Insightful...