Almost one and a half years ago, Google launched its webmail service named Google Mail or widely known as GMail. GMail soon became popular because they offer a huge storage space, 1GB. The size of this huge space keeps incerasing time over time, and know it reaches 2.5GB. That big storage space is the idea behind GMail Drive.

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium. 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. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your Gmail account and retrieve them again. Screenshot below shows the copy process from other drive to virtual drive from GMail Drive.

So how does it work? When you create a new file (copy or move file to the virtual drive), GMail Drive works in the background by generating an e-mail and post that files to your GMail account. That emaill appears in your normal. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. Periodically, GMail Drive checks your GMail account, using GMail search function, to see if a new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures of the virtual drive.

Since email from GMail Drive will exist on your Inbox folder, it is recommended to create a filter in GMail to automatically move those emails (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to your archived mail folder. If you’re too lazy to do that, you can also create another GMail account and use it completely for your storage medium.

Several notes from the GMail Drive author:

• Several limitations exist on the file-system. For example, the maximum length of the filename is 40 characters.
• Any changes in the GMail system may stop GMail Drive from working correctly. He also cannot guarantee that files stored in GMail using GMail Drive will be accessible in the future (if the GMail system changed).

If you want to try GMail Drive, make sure you download version 1.07. Google recently changed GMail system, so the previous GMail Drive version won’t work.

Some more screenshots:

[ Download GMail Drive ] [ Visit GMail Drive Website ]