Gmail by Google beta logo. Courtesy Google. Someone has come up with neat little utility that effectively turns your Gmail account into a virtual hard drive on your Windows PC. The author explains:

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.

The application was inspired by the Linux-based GmailFS by Richard Jones.

I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that this application will be affected by Gmail's 10 megabyte (MB) file attachment limit.

Because of the way that e-mail encodes file attachments, those files can effectively double in size, so what was a 5 MB file, when sent by e-mail -- or stored in a Gmail account, which is just another e-mail account -- becomes 10 MB or more. This is one of many reasons that I don't like to send or receive files via e-mail.

It clogs up the Inbox and, in the event that I need to resort to a dial-up 56K connection, even a 1 MB file attachment makes it impossible to download mail with any reasonable speed.

But I digress.

This is a useful, cool little Gmail hack that extends Gmail beyond its original design.

 
via Slashdot | GMail Drive Shell Extension