This is a single archived entry from Stefan Tilkov’s blog. For more up-to-date content, check out my author page at INNOQ, which has more information about me and also contains a list of published talks, podcasts, and articles. Or you can check out the full archive.

GMail File System

Stefan Tilkov,

Don't know what to do with the 1 GB of storage in your gmail account? How about this:

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail. GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).

(via Sean McGrath)

On September 4, 2004 9:41 PM, Wolfgang said:

OK, I can ‘cp’ to GMail. But I have no Idea what to copy. How can a 1GB Web-Filesystem be usefull?

On September 4, 2004 10:12 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Neither have I; I just found the whole idea funny (I bet even the Google folks didn’t think of this).

Seriously, though, even as a mail storage, 1GB is ridiculous - my last two years’ emails make up for 2 GB alone.

On September 16, 2004 7:10 PM, JW said:

I thought it was a cool idea. I am not sure what to do with it yet, but I am sure I will think of something.