Gmail as an "electronic filing system"

[Austin Moody]

I've put a lot of effort lately into gathering up all of my "stuff" and
properly filing it away. All of the physical paper things are fairly
well taken care of, but I was struggling on what to do with all of the
digital "stuff". All the pdf, work, excel, etc... documents laying
around on my hard drive, network drives, usb keys that needed to be
easily found.

I've been trying out a lot of different things, but so far the thing
that is working the best for me is Gmail. The search capabilities are
great and it is available everywhere there is an internet connection.

I sent one of my 50 remaining Gmail invites to myself and created
another seperate Gmail account just for storing documents.

So now when I get a document that I need to save for later use I attach
it to an e-mail it to this account.

To make searching a bit more simple I fill up the subject line of the
e-mail with "tags" (think del.icio.us or flickr) related to the
file, and the body with a brief description of the document's
contents.

I'm giving it a trial run now, and so far it works pretty well.

Potential problems:

* Gmail accounts give you 1 gigabyte of space. What happens when you
hit this ceiling? However I'm thinking doing a good purge every so
often should keep this from happening (to me at least) anytime soon.
* Security? No one has my account password (hopefully) but still my
documents are "out there".

Sorry if this has already been posted here before.

--austin

[Vinod Kurup]

Hi Austin,

I use gmail for some file storage as well. I don't use a separate
account though - I'm trying to keep everything in 1 place, if possible.
I started using gmail in october and I'm currently using 150 mb, so I
too was worried about storage space, but Google just upped the limit to
2 Gigs and is planning on going higher from there:

http://www.google.com/gmail/help/whatsnew.html

[Mark Hurd]

I've done something very similar, I created a separate account that I
just use as a fileserver of sorts. Only problem I've found so far is
that GMail doesn't allow attachments larger than 8MB in size.

For your standard documents/lists/what have you, however, this
shouldn't be a problem.

Mark

[Adrienne Travis]

I know this is a mostly mac-Centric group -- but there's also a
Windows 2000/XP shell extension that lets you map your Gmail account
directly into "My Computer" as an extra drive. It's at
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html
. I know a similar thing is available for Linux, but dunno about Mac
OS.

--adrienne

[Joey]

Mark,

Not to be nitpicky but the max size is now 10MB for attachments. Every
little bit helps!

-Joey

[David Rosam]

Um. Isn't that for Linux?:

>GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail
account as its storage medium.

This appears to be for Windows:

http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Just about to try it.

David

--
David Rosam
SEO and IT copywriting
david...@gmail.com http://dangerous-thinking.com
+44 (0)70 440 ROSAM (76726) Skype:davidrosam

[David Rosam]

And it's cool :-)

Thanks for the pointer.

David

[Knight777]

Just incase you haven't heard yet, google is upping gmail accounts to 2
gigs. If you have that much email then prayers for serenity and a
choice wine are likely in order!

[JesusFA]

I´d like to probe that that but i don´t have an gmail account. Could
somebody invite me?
thanks
jesusferna...@yahoo.es

[John]

I don't understand how anyone can trust their important information to
a free service by a company with whom they have absolutely no real
connection.

[Samuel DeVore]

I really have found that the best use for gmail has been for mailing
lists, it really is a nice way to read and interact with the lists.

Sam D

[Knight777]

Just sent you an invite. Let me know if you got it alright.

[Kram]

I've been a lurker here on 43 Folders for a few months, since getting
into GTD and finding the 43 Folders site. I hate for my first post here
to be a grovel, but is there anyone who could send me an invite to
gmail too?

As for electronic filing, I've just been using a 1GB USB clip drive
holding regular folders and files and my Wikidpad data (I have to use
XP for my company, though I'm trying to find a way to get back into
Macs. Our IT people are really set against us using Macs in the office.
Grrr....

Anyway, if anyone can help - thanks a bunch!
mark...@yahoo.com

[lurkrwolf]

Sent you an invite. Enjoy. :)

[Kram]

Many thanks. I think I've got it set up now. Looks good!
Kindness is so reassuring in this world of ours...

[Erik Hansen]

First post, reading GTD...

No one has mentioned "plus addressing" with gmail. Kinda nifty way of
auto filtering (archiving) emails. I have a filter that looks for
"myaddre...@gmail.com" and labels it "music" and archives it.

If anyone needs a gmail account email me directly, too.

- Erik

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
ERIK A. HANSEN
er...@monkeyswithchopstix.com, eaha...@gmail.com
AIM: error1k

"I'm a big bounty hunter like Boba Fett..."
-The Roots

[Jan Erik Moström]

> No one has mentioned "plus addressing" with gmail. Kinda nifty way of
> auto filtering (archiving) emails. I have a filter that looks for
> "myaddre...@gmail.com" and labels it "music" and archives it.

Note that the same can be done with most mail services (using your
desktop client), the support for "+" addresses is mail server
dependent. I've checked the 5 different mail servers I use and all
support it. However, I know of one mail server that isn't configured
to handle this so you need to check the server you use to be sure.

--
Jan Erik Moström, mos...@gmail.com

[JesusFA]

Thanks a lot for the invitations
i have the account now
thank you very much
Jesus