GMail Drive: Interesting and Innovative Concept
October 28th, 2004 Leave a comment Visited 54 times, 4 so far today
GMail Drive: Interesting and Innovative Concept
Google’s GMail is yet to move out of Beta, but it has already changed the way we look at webmail. It has led to a major overhaul in online space provided by webmail services. Yahoo! Mail went 100 Megs while Hotmail declared they would give 250 Megs (still to be implemented for me at least). In addition, the developer community has provided so many add-on tools to enhance the power provided by GMail.
We have seen GMail notifiers and we have seen GMail on WAP. One of the recent developments was a virtual file system that was being implemented on GMail. GMail Drive Shell Extension is one application utilizing that virtual file system and creates a virtual drive in windows operating system. It is a small 116k download and asks for a user id and password, which you can fill with your GMail id and password.
It appears like just another drive (named GMail Drive) in windows explorer. And copying files is as simple as drag and drop! What it does in the background is make a new mail on the GMail server with the copied file as an attachment. And these mails are accessible from inside GMail as normal mails. In broader sense, what you get is a 1GB internet drive to store files, which are accessible from anywhere from inside a browser.
Of course, there are some limitations. GMail does not allow .exe attachments, the software automatically rename them for you. You cannot upload files greater than 10 Megs. Also, the filename cannot be larger than 40 characters. Still a gig of online storage accessible from windows explorer is very tempting. Compress the files, break it into smaller pieces, and upload it. And you have a backup of your important files.
What complicates the situation is Google’s policy regarding using GMail for these purposes. I am not sure if this breaks their terms and conditions. We are using GMail without seeing the very popular adsense ads inside mails for sharing files, so I believe they won’t be liking the idea. Also, if this trend catches on… Google is looking at a massive storage misuse. The worse that can happen is that Google can cancel your GMail account and remove all stored files. Or maybe they can give this project their blessings. Nevertheless, it is a novel concept which if used correctly can make file sharing a lot more easier.
Check more information and download GMail Drive at: GMail Drive shell extension
|
TechWhack on Facebook
|
October 29th, 2004 at 09:46 pm
Minor corrections: I believe that Yahoo actually upgraded their storage to 100 MB whilst Hotmail upgraded to 250MB (rather than the other way round) – though for me as well Hotmail have yet to supply this. Also, I’m pretty sure that GMail does allow .zip attachments so long as they do not contain executable files. Noneleless interesting article.
October 29th, 2004 at 09:58 pm
Right you are, its a mistake on my part. Yahoo! Mail for me is also 100 megs . Hotmail is supposed to be 250megs but I still have 2megs. No further updates from MSN in my knowledge…
As for Zip. In the earlier days, GMail was definitely blocking zip files. I know because I stopped using Zip in favor of Rar when this happened (most of my pals use GMail now). GMail drive too renames upload Zip files with modified extension. But today I did got a zip file on my GMail though EXE are still bouncing back.
This raise another issue I discussed sometime back. Bouncing mails is not a good solution. Google needs to look into online mail scanning. I can easily rename a zip file or exe containing virus to some obsecure format and send it through GMail. Not good.
But then it is a beta and I cannot obviously complain. :)
October 29th, 2004 at 10:48 pm
Its not sending viruses through the gmail system that they are worried about. Rename your ZIP or EXE files to whatever you want they will pass
through..thats not what they are looking to prevent.
October 29th, 2004 at 11:03 pm
why do you think that they are not worried about users getting infected from viruses?
i think it was the reason they are blocking exe attachments till the time they have an antivirus on their servers…
June 20th, 2005 at 03:20 pm
By now Yahoo! has upped their mail storage to 1 gig. Does anyone know if there is a Yahoo! Drive Shell extension around already?
October 22nd, 2005 at 05:15 pm
Hotmail has an anti-virus on it, but their service doesn’t allow EXE files either.
December 7th, 2005 at 11:34 am
Nice article. I have came across another tool called Php Gmail Drive by Rahat Ayub. It has web based facility to access Gmail files. You can search it online.
February 17th, 2006 at 09:09 am
and another cool tool i found was GSpace, an extension for firefox…. works like an ftp upload program.