GMail Drive helps you take full advantage of your e-mail quota !

About

GMail Drive offers you the chance of using your 6GB e-mail quota as a remote storage device. Practically you get to use ALL your available e-mail space for storing pictures, music, videos or anything else that fits ! The good part is that this way you don’t need to worry anymore about the progress bar indicating something like “< 10% of your e-mail storage space is being used”, which is really great. I think Gmail is a reliable e-mail service that carries out its tasks in an exceptional manner. Don’t forget about the fact that your 6 gigs are entirely FREE ! Enough with Gmail and Google advertising already :)

This great, yet small tool does nothing else but to actually create a partition-like icon in “My computer” through which you can connect to your 6GB of free remote “storage device” which is actually your Gmail account.

Installation

In order to use this tool you need to have IE 5 or above. After downloading the required archive (Mirror 1, Mirror 2) all you need to do is to unpack it and run Setup.exe. Once the process is complete you will see a window containing some text that confirms all went ok. After that close the window and go to “My Computer” and refresh your content.

Usage

Right click on the GMail Drive icon and choose “Login As”. Type in your username and password and hit OK. If you wish to configure your access further more you can do that by clicking the “More” button and choose from the available options like preserving your file names, use of your draft folder, secure http transfer or proxy authentification. That’s all you need to do in order to get access to your storage space. When you will send a file to the mail server you’ll see that a message will appear in your “Inbox” folder that will contain the corresponding attachment.

Conclusion

I don’t really know if this is 100% OK with Google but I figured out that they would have made some kind of modifications to the system if this wasn’t for some reasons in accordance with their TOS. GMail Drive could be of use for many people out there that don’t have another online storage alternative. Its progress animations, user-friendly interface make of it one small, easy to use yet helpful tool.

Here’s a tiny screencast I recorded (if I may call it this way) that shows you how to handle things. If you wish to see the original-sized clip feel free to download it (~1.6MB).

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