the world, or part of it

Just about everyone I know who uses Gmail has the same comment on the amount of space available: there is too much to use. It is not necessarily a complaint, but it raises a good question. What is there to do with all of this space? Three gig isn’t too much for most things, but for an email account, it has plenty of space for even the most intrepid spammers.

Well, I was browsing digg this morning in school and came across this article, but since I was still in class, there wasn’t much I could do with ten minutes left in the period. The first and – in my opinion – best featured item in the article is the Gspace feature which completely blew my mind. It is basically a way to utilize all of your Gmail space with things other than countless emails.

I’m certain that many have felt the same as me sometime, as I have sent countless emails to myself containing papers and projects that I need to complete. Well, this kind of takes out the middle man when doing this. You basically just install the program in Firefox and set it up with your Gmail account. After this, you upload your documents, music, pictures, videos, etc. and after transfer on Gspace, an email is sent to Gmail containing the files you’ve uploaded.

I would have to say my only problem with the files being sent to Gmail is that each file gets a separate email, even if you upload a few at a time. It’s a minor inconvenience, though, considering that for the most part, needs will be limited to one file, and as long as they are all properly labeled, you can just keep them all in one place.

After my initial excitement, I began to think that, for the most part, this wasn’t going to save me much more time than just emailing the files from Thunderbird, but then I stumbled over what I consider its killer application. I sent a few songs through Gspace to see what I could do with them when they made it over and had a pleasant surprise. When clicking on the email with the song in it, there were two options: download or play. Well, naturally, I selected play and this player came up, conveniently playing my song quickly and without hassle, but what else would you expect from Google.

Overall, the feature has enormous potential to utilize some of that Gmail space. If anyone else has been using this, feel free to comment with some tips or tricks that I haven’t mentioned or discovered yet; I’ll be very interested to hear them.