Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

Amongst my random ramblings over the web, I recently came across an offer for a free 2 GB hard drive. Now before you cry 'scam' and tar and feather me, this offer is open only to those with a Gmail email account. The reason for this is due to a little program called GmailFS, or more colloquially as the Gmail Drive Shell extension (say that three times fast...). This neat little tidbit creates a file system in concert with a Gmail account, effectively turning your Gmail mailbox into a network drive of 2 GB+ (as the Gmail team has been adding storage capacity to Gmail accounts (as of this writing, the capacity was at 2.218 GB and counting). I have been testing this program for the last week and found it to work beautifully, but of course, as a network drive, the faster your Internet connection, the faster the response.

GmailFS handles files essentially by turning them into attachments and sending them straight into the archived section of your Gmail account, which means that even if your network drive is offline, your files are accessible through Gmail's noted search function, just like any other email. GmailFS can be found at as a free download.

What's that, you say? You don't have a Gmail account because you don't know anyone who can invite you? We have a solution for that as well! isnoop.net is chock-full of kind-hearted souls just waiting to hand out their Gmail invites to those going without. Considering each Gmail account is now effectively a 2 GB+ network drive powered by Google, the time to grab this and make use of it is yesterday.

Standard boilerplate: This program is a beta. That means if it breaks or if Google decides to stop supporting it, it's nobody's fault. It's neat, but use it just like anything else computer-related: save early, save often, and in more than one place. [Britt Godwin]