So now that Gmail accounts have become more ubiquitous and less exclusive (I’ve got 50 invites sitting around on my account) the question of what to actually do with them begins to raise its head. Of course I’ve got one that I kind of use as a secondary email for convenience. But of course the promise of a free gig of space was much too tempting to get just one, and so I actually have several more than that just sitting around. 3rd party tools for Gmail have been pretty common for a while too, including things like scripts that would let you upload files directly to your Gmail account to use as online storage. That seemed like a good idea to me, but always a bit too unwieldy. Not anymore. There’s an app called Gmail Drive (Windows only) that’s a shell extension to add a virtual drive to your machine that stores files in a Gmail account. Pretty slick. You can just drop files onto it, and view files on it as if it were an actual drive. Of course there are a few limitations. For one, there’s a 10 meg individual file size limit, but I think that’s imposed by Gmail itself. Also, it’s currently not possible to open files directly from the Gmail drive. You have to copy them over to an actual drive to open them. It’d be nice to see that added in a later version. Still, its the most convenient interface I’ve seen yet to all those gigs of free storage out there.

Comments

Comment by Nathan Hessler on 2005-02-15 18:35:39 +0000

That is awesome. Love my gmail and this just makes it better, except I don’t use windows.

Comment by Will on 2005-02-15 19:08:29 +0000

What? When did you abandon ship? What’s your OS of choice these days?