Sunday, May 4, 2008

GmailFS How-To

GmailFS is an application, available for Windows too, which allows you using your gmail account's space as a normal storage space. You access it with user/password of your account, and all the files you put into this filesystem will be send as an attachment to your gmail box. So gmail is used as a file parking :)

The Debian package is called gmailfs and it depends on fuse and python-fuse. Fuse is a project hosted on fuse.sourceforge.net to implement filesystems in userspace. Type:

apt-get install gmailfs



and gmailfs is installed!

Currently there is no documentation but a manpage of a little utility, mount.gmailfs, which can be useful; however I'm going to describe the steps to make your gmailfs application work correctly. Open the configuration file /etc/gmailfs/gmailfs.conf, very easy. The first lines configure an access via proxy server, the other fields want the username and password (which is clear, without cryptography: make sure you set proper permissions) of your gmail account, and other little things like the log file. Save the file, then type these commands:

mkdir /mnt/gmail
mount -t gmailfs none /mnt/gmail



So you "mounted" the new filesystem, you can add file, but every operation and command in this filesystem will be much slower so be patient. Every file added causes the send of 3-4 mails to your account, only one of them has the attachment with a strange name :) Once you finished, unmount avec 'umount' and all is done :)

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