GmailFS - The Google File System

Scott Granneman writes "Looking to use that new Gmail account for something really innovative? How about combining it with a brand new filesystem for Linux? Then GmailFS might be the answer: 'GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. ... GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename.'"

Re:3rd party software

[doofusclam]

If you bothered to read that thread, or actually used gmail yourself, you'd know that they aren't cracking down on third party addons (although they'd be in the rights to do so) - they're just adding captcha style logons in situations where an incorrect password has been entered too many times. It's simply to stop programs brute forcing gmail accounts.

does it support the "account yanked" operation?

[Daniel Ellard]

This is a cute hack, but practical? No.

If you want google to paw through all your files and risk having your account yanked for violating the user agreement, feel free to use it... (heck, maybe google won't yank your account in return for the opportunity to index your files...)

Mail-based file systems are nothing new [geocities.com], nor are http-based file systems [usenix.org] (or WebDAV, for that matter).

Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[killbill!]

GMX [gmx.net] has been offering 1 GB of storage for email and files for free for some time now.
Expand this to 5 GB for 3 EUR / month or 10 GB for 5 EUR / month.

You can also share your uploaded files with other GMX members, and mount your GMX account as a network drive using a WebDAV client (they provide a pre-configured Windows client but you may use another one) .

By the way, their e-mail features totally 0wn any other e-mail service: automated e-mail retrieval from all your other POP-enabled mailboxes, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...

I knew all that time spent learning German at school would come in handy some day! ;p

Google FS

[Barryke]

There is a Google FS:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125 -g hemawat.pdf

Prediction from the earlier GMail notifier FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the notifier story (who didn't bother to actually link to any real software or provide any evidence) claims that gmail requires "catchas" for login now. Well, I can login to gmail just fine without a captcha. Gmail only seems to show catchas when something appears to be "attacking" their login system.

Big systems need ways to limit abuse, otherwise a single user with a broken perl (or python) script will take down the entire service.

Gmailfs works by sending an email EVERY TIME a file is updated! (from my understanding at least) I predict that users of gmailfs will soon start bitching about their accounts getting shut down after they send a few thousand emails.

How dare google do this! I was just compiling the linux kernel on gmailfs and suddenly my account stopped working! Google sold out to microsoft!

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually "Gigabyte" means 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is because "giga-" is a metric prefix meaning 1,000,000,000.

1,073,741,824 bytes would be properly described as a "Gibibyte", as per the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC's) International Standard. This was adopted in 1998.

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/ [t1shopper.com]

Re:Hmm Weird..

[mewphobia]

If you had ever filled up your gmail account completely (was I the only geek who had to try) you'll see that it can actually hold 102% or 1024MB.

It just says 1000MB at the bottom of the screen :P

Good of you for noticing.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[perler]

as stated yesterday, how do you conclude, that a change in login procedure while in beta is meant to exclude third party email checkers - and WHY?! with you pranoia you should apply for a job at intel ;)

PAT

Just a suggestion...

[MichaelSmith]

Don't mount it setuid

Re:IE is the only working browser.

[natd]

Mate, I don't even *HAVE* IE and I use GMail. Firefox and Safari (depending on which machine I'm at) and I haven't had a problem yet...even before they officially supported Safari.

IE only is the *last* think Google would do.

FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB WebDAV

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to be about Google to be newsworthy, hasn't it? GMX, a German webmail provider, offers free 1GB mail accounts which are accessible by web, POP3 and WebDAV. You can also share your files with other GMX users. Transfer volume is limited to twice the storage amount per month.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[ymgve]

It's not the usage of the space they object to, rather the fact that many unneccesary http connections from mail checkers and the like slow the servers down. Even more so when you plan to use gmail as a filesystem with (worst case) several connections per second.

not necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Backups can be automated, including the encryption. Use "gpg -r [your id] --encrypt-files [files]" to encrypt your files. GPG will not ask for a password, because it is using your public key to encrypt. You will however need your password for your private key in order to decrypt them.

Or, if you want a live encrypted filesystem, try encfs (a pass-through filesystem which is also FUSE based, see http://freshmeat.net/projects/encfs/ [freshmeat.net]). Although I haven't tried chaining them, you can probably mount encfs on top of gmailfs and have encrypted data stored in gmail..

Re:IE is the only working browser.

[officepotato]

Take a look at the HTML - There's a table, with the first row having height 676, then ... the beginning of ANOTHER row, not the contents of that row like there should be. Everything BESIDES IE is correctly rendering the empty 676px tall row. A quick run through a HTML validator might benifit the page's author.

Right...

[Jon.Laslow]

Yes, Google is blocking Third Party Checkers. So that must be why when I open up Firefox, GMail Notifier [nexgenmedia.net] alerts me that I have seven messages waiting for me. If you would, take a look at their changelog:

Current version: 0.3.3 * Gmail changed, which broke notifiers, updated login code to the new system.

So yes, Google changed the login system, and the software was updated to work with it. Does this seem like an attempt to block other clients from checking GMail? Not really. It looks more like they updated their software, and it had a side effect which was apparently fairly easily correctable.

It looks to me as if a few people here decided to take the Third Part Checker article to be the absolute, unbending truth, and didn't bother to check around to make sure it was.

Re:Cool! Now Google can sell ads for my files!

[KitFox]

Hmmm...

That FAQ lists several "Alternative" Free Email providers with at least one GB of data storage that "Don't invade your privacy like GMail does".

So I poked at two of them.

Aventure-Mail: No longer accepting free accounts.

Walla!: This one scares me. From the Walla TOS [walla.com]:
To enable an upgrade to a 1 gigabyte account, Walla! may require additional information from individuals who already subscribe to a Walla! account.

Okay... So I'm giving them more personal information.. Not too bad. They want to "Target their marketing to what I am interested in." Fine. Then I reach the next scary thing:

Walla!Mail does not use or analyze the actual text in an e-mail message to select which ads to distribute to users, nor does any human read your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent. (Okay, so none of the ads they show me are at all related to the content of the email.) In addition, our automatic link creator highlights predetermined keywords within an e-mail. These words are not personalized and you have the option, at your discretion, to follow these links to paid content. (Wait... I thought you just said you didn't look in the email to target ads... But it looks like not only do you look in the email, but you actually CHANGE THE CONTENT of the email to put inline ads in the email.)

Now, maybe I'm missing something here... GMail "analyzes" content. Yep. means if it sees "new car" and "ford" in the message, and doesn't see "sucks" in the message, it might show an advert for Ford cars on the right side, and maybe car loans. If the word "sucks" or "horrible" or various other negative words are in the message, they won't even put in ads.

Walla, instead of putting those advertisements inobtrusively on the righthand side, apparently reserves the right to turn every incident of the string " Ford " into a hyperlink to www.ford.com, or various other things. You could be getting an email about "Ford sucks. Ford makes nothing but lemons. Ford transmissions fall apart so quickly, and Ford's paint jobs peel like crazy." and every single mention of the word Ford would be converted to a link by Walla saying "Come buy our wonderful Fords!"... And this is BETTER?!

So how come everybody is screaming bloody murder about intelligent keyword checking that puts unobtrusive advertisements on the far right of the page (And mind you, I HATE HATE HATE spam, and I ignore 99.9% of all banner ads on pages, but the Ads in GMail have actually led to interesting and useful stuff sometimes), and the "official solution" is to have -the actual content of the incoming mail changed by adding hyperlinks to advertisements-?! It may SOUND scary, but it's because this world seems to suffer from Panic Syndrome.

I consider GMail's advertisements to be the least intrusive and most user-friendly of every single free email site I have seen. "But they can see if I'm sending a gmail user something about bombs!" Um... Sure... heard of Carnivore? Think they can't do that elsewhere? And why the heck are you sending something about bombs anyway?? Are you sending things to anybody that you don't want automated systems to use keywords in your email to show the recipient advertisements? Then don't send it to Walla either. They'll change the keywords in your email into advert links.

Honestly, it's all a ruddy witch hunt. And if anybody sends me one of those pre-made replies, I'll send right back to them the facts about those "other solutions" that the reply speaks so highly of. And then I will remove them from my address book. Nobody means so much to me that I -HAVE- to get in touch with them, and if they are that paranoid about what they are writing, then why am I receiving it?

Re:On the spoke. . .

[KarmaMB84]

It's invite only because it's not done yet. ;p

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Shinobi]

Actually, the SI prefixes were defined in 1874, well before the computer science people fucked up and broke the standards compliance.

Re:Traffic?

[piquadratCH]

Do you know of any traffic limits once you start sharing those 10 GB of data with a lot of "good friends"?

Traffic limit is at twice the size of the account. 2GB for the free one, 10 or 20 for the paid ones. So, no warez or pr0n sharing here...

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[Anonymous Coward]

GMX is THE German webmail provider and has been around for more than 6 years (about half a year longer than Google).

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[seanmeister]

Since Paragraph 5 of the TOS [google.com] maybe?

" You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. "

Not that I like it, and not that it even appears to allow the use of their own notifier app, but there it is.

loopback crypto

[hey]

If you want crypt you can use a loopback crypt
on your GmailFS parition.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Loopback-Encrypted-Fil es ystem-HOWTO.html#toc3

Re:where's the evidence?

[yuting]

Google's Terms of Use:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.ht ml [google.com]

"You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"

On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail. Having said that, Google's own mail checker checks mail every 2 minutes. And most people who use third-party software to access GMail don't seem to have problems. Google's reaction to the breach of their ToS seems to be as random as the way they give out GMail invites...

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[AllNicksWereTaken]

They didn't say anything about not wanting third-party gmail checkers. The reason they made the image verifier thing is to prevent potential abuse from spammers using bots to login and send spam from Gmail (whose fast servers would allow for sending HUGE amounts of spam at once).

It's still possible for third-party Gmail apps to interact with the service. They just need a little upgrade so they read existing cookies rather than login to Gmail to obtain them.
I've explained how to do it here [slashdot.org].

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[keeboo]

GMX [gmx.net] is a great free e-mail service IMO. My main e-mail account is hosted there since few years ago.
Nowadays, unfortunately, GMX offers their service in German language only... So its public is restricted.

Re:why?

[Kethinov]

You're wasting your time talking about what people should and shouldn't do with GMail. Until Google makes it impossible to do or devises negative consequences for doing it, it's fair game.

Re:All set up...

[schmoo.me]

sorry...hehehe...http://schmoo.me.uk/images/Screen shot.jpg [schmoo.me.uk]

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[LostCluster]

I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat".

Anything that violates a terms of service IS NOT LEGAL. The penality is civil rather than criminal and rarely enforced, but there is a punishment assigned for doing that in laws, making those things are against the law.

If a piece of software does something that the TOS says it can't do, it is illegal software from the moment it's coded. That fits black hat's definition.