Posted by: ne0 February 1, 2009
Using GMAIL as Hard Drive on your computer
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Few people had asked me offline how to do this so here's how to use the extra space you have in your gmail as a hard drive space.

When you register your gmail you may have 2 GB to begin with but this limit keeps on increasing as time goes by. currently I personally have a 7.29 GB limit set on my account. Your emails don't normally take more than few hundred MB's of disk space so you end up having quite a handful of virtual disc space that you can utilize.

  1. Go to http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/GMail-Drive-shell-extension-Download-15944.html and download the GMail Drive shell extension
  2. This is a zip file, extract the files in the zip file using 7zip(http://www.7-zip.org/download.html) or WinZip (http://winzip.com). Most likely you already have a zip application which will open when you open the downloaded Gmail drive shell extention installer.
  3. Double click on the setup.exe file from the list of files you have extracted and continue the installation.
  4. Once the installation is finished, if you go to My Computer in your windows explorer you will see a drive called GMail drive.Double click on it and it will ask you for gmail login and password which you can enter. If noone else uses the computer besides you, you sould check the save password option so that you don't have to enter it every time.
  5. Now you can copy paste from other directories to this and vice versa at will.
Note: The speed of transfer to and from the GMail drive will depend on your internet connection. The way the gmail drive works is as follows, you really don't need to know this but if you're interested read on. The Gmail Drive shell extension is nothing but an application that emails out your files to your own email account with a label of GMAILFS, and shows the list of content of your google mailbox with GMAILFS labels on your computer as a harddrive space. So, when you view the list of your gmail inbox after saving some files to your gmail drive, you will actually see some emails you mailed yourself with a label of GMAILFS with the files emailed as attachments. Which you can essentially download/delete through your gmail from anywhere.
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