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."

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!

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:Nice, but doomed

[robot captain]

I don't see how it could be doomed. So long as google doesn't implement a maximum file size to incoming e-mails, what would prevent anyone from sending an email to a gmail account with a large file to leave on the google system for any period of time?

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.

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 [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 [pricewatch.com].

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.

Wow

[downbad]

This is almost as cool as SlashdotFS [slashdot.org].

Other limitations

[Leikhim]

It seems that google won't let you send some file types. I've tried zips and bats, and both types gave me a "Sorry, for security reasons we can't let you send this" error. Next version should rename forbidden file types to work around this. no .inf, .hlp, .dll.... Well, that's as far as I got before my storage medium got slashdotted.

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?

Now If Only...

[JohnPerkins]

...it had a setting that would let me connect more than one gmail account to one virtual drive... I could use my invites to create more gmail accounts for myself...exponential progression...free multi-tb drive for me!

is this tool safe?

[johansalk]

1. I'm increasingly alarmed by any tool that requests a username and a password. 2. would google terminate the account? don't they have a rule against third party notifiers?

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

An obvoius violation of the Gmail license.

[iceco2]

Gmail makes money by showing you adds,
this kind of automated interface is strictly prohibeted. Just like any automated interface to Gmail, If you use Gmail you must not use any automated tool to read your mail and display it too you out of Gmail.
There is nothing to prevent you from using Gmail as file storage but when you want to access your files you should pay for your privlage by watching adds.

Me

Re:Cool hack...

[rzbx]

It makes sense to me. As a business do you not cater to your market? Their market is interested in large email storage, and more. So they deliver. Whether or not it is easy to do, some do not have an interest in doing it themselves. Some want their job outsourced to a company. Not everyone is interested in, or capable of doing it themselves. Not everyone is like the typical slashdot member. Think business when viewing BUSINESS like decisions. Too many submitters here throw out "why" and make their argument yet ignore other points of view. Although the internet is changing business, a business's number one goal is still profit.

Re:Nice, but doomed

[chewy_2000]

It'd be trivial to implement, you would think - just about every archiving program out there has a feature to split up files. However, I have no doubt that if Google wants to, they'll be able to stop this - even if they just limited the amount of incoming emails to any one account from one IP address, or something similar. If this gains any kind of popularity they probably will stop it, although it'd be interesting to see some kind of varient of this from google (probably paid for, since I can't see how ads would tie in here..).

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.

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:Requires IE...

[Amata]

I'm thinking that this may have something to do with just how deeply IE has been embedded into the modern Windows OS. Explorer and Internet Explorer are nearly indistinguishable, each being able to do the functions of the other. So I'm thinking that whatever makes Explorer able to do this is a "feature" of Internet Explorer.

But that's just a guess, with zero basis in actual knowledge of how this crud works.

Why use a hack...

[Anonymous Coward]

... when you can get a better solution for free?

GMX.net (service only in german?) gives everyone 1GB of combined mail and WebDAV-storage (called MediaCenter) for free.

No hack, no illegitimate use of a free email client... You can even share your files with others :)

The only limit is (IIRC) that you have a transfer limit of 2x1GB per month.

I'd be surprised if services like this would not exist in english, too.

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.

Use and Abuse of Diskspace

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so the floodgates are open. But so what? If 10,000 users use 1GB each that is still only a reasonable number of 200GB drives. And what does it give Google? Why, even more data by which to generate information.

Google introduced pageranking which means the quantity of links implies relevance and importance. With GMail and Google community they can now start asessing also the quality of those that link up an item. Expect ranking, especially of Google Goups articles to improve.

Google is not evil but they are not stupid either.

Interesting

[Britz]

Of course this is interesting, and shows the talents and ideas that can occur in the world of free/open software.

But Google is a business and they do need to make money and this would be a surefire way for them to lose money (a load of their storage used up, no way to show their adverts, etc) so if anyone seriously used this I can imagine their account disabled.

What I want is google officially creating (or officially blessing the ones that already exist) a gmail notifier app for Mozilla. Technically, using the 3rd party ones that the Mozilla community develop are against their terms of service. They already do an official notifier but it's Windows only - a Mozilla based one would be cross platform.
Googlebomb IE - link the IE homepage to the phrase 'piece of shit'

Sorry linuxci, I am such a karma whore sometimes, but memory seems short at slashdot:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s id=119770&c id=10101654

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 [google.com], 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.

For Mac too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Code can be compiled on any system w/ the right libraries and other stuffs.

So it's for Mac too! Yay!

others already offer this without hack

[Fëanáro]

Here in Germany we have a free mail provider (GMX [www.gmx.de]) that offers 1 GB (since a few months), for mails AND for files, and you can access them as a file system [gmx.net](link to German site) using the open WebDAV protocol [webdav.org] 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.)

Re:I'm amused.

[Awptimus Prime]

So Linux users have been parasites and breaking Gmail's TOS longer than Windows folks? I'm proud of you all.

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... [google.com]

• 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 [brillig.com] money to kill Iraqis [iraqbodycount.net]. 140 billion borrowed [costofwar.com]. With interest, you pay 200 billion.