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Using Your Gmail Account as a Virtual Drive

  • Dec 30, 2005
GMail Drive is a nifty piece of software that lets you use the voluminous space Google offers through its email service as a virtual file system. Using GMail Drive is simple, and it walks and talks just like a hard drive on your computer. After reading this article, you may join Kulvir Bhogal and retire your USB thumb drive, opting for this impressive online alternative.
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I tend to use my online email account as a way to store important files. I just email the files to myself as attachments, and the files are available any time I might need them. In short, I frequently use my email account as a virtual drive (for lack of a better term).

When I first found out how much space Google offered for its Gmail service, I was in awe. At the time of writing, Google was offering a whopping 2656 MB of storage space. That’s right, more than 2.6 gigabytes of space! I tend to get a lot of email, but not enough to even chink the armor of such a voluminous amount of space.

Unfortunately, treating my email account as a virtual drive involves the drill of my having to log into the account, creating a message, attaching the desired files to the message, and then sending the message to me. This can be a really time-consuming process.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to GMail Drive, a shell namespace extension that lets you use its Gmail account on its Windows operating system—just as if it were a real drive. GMail Drive is a free application, making it all the more delectable. After finding out about the GMail Drive, I have since retired my USB thumb drive, opting for the online alternative I will introduce you to.

For this article, I am assuming that you have a Gmail account. At the time of this article’s writing, Google requires that you provide the Gmail website with your mobile phone number. Gmail will then send you an invitation code, which is needed to create your Gmail account.

How GMail Drive Works (Behind the Scenes)

At first, the capability of GMail Drive to allow you to use its Gmail account as a storage medium seems like magic. However, have you heard the saying that magic is just an illusion? The adage certainly holds true for GMail Drive. GMail Drive performs the same tedious work of creating an email message, attaching a file, and sending the message to the email address that I talked about earlier. The "magic" is that the GMail Drive application does all of the tedious work for you. The email message representing a file on your GMail Drive can be seen in your Gmail account Inbox folder. GMail Drive constantly checks your email account behind the scenes (a daemon-like approach) to monitor changes to the contents of your email drive.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020