With GMail growing in size every second ( current available space in my account is around 7195 MB !! ) there is more than enough space for anyone to store most of their EMails.
But, do we really need so much space, I mean I don’t know anyone personally who’d use even 50% of the size being offered by GMail. This is where we can use GMail Drive. GMail drive behaves just like Windows Explorer and lets us store files in it, more like an online temporary storage device.
GMail Drive actually is a Shell Namespace Extension which turns your GMail account into a storage medium by creating a virtual file system on top of Google GMail account.
So basically GMail Drive will be just another filesystem which will reside inside Windows Explorer and gives you the freedom to save files into and retrieve saved files from GMail account. GMail Drive will be another Drive which you’ll see along with other regular drives like C, D drives under the My Computer Folder.
There is practically no difference between GMail Drive and any other physical drives in your system except for the fact that the content within GMail drive is present in the virtual space, i.e. within your Gmail account. You can create folders, delete folders, drag’n’drop files into and out of the drive. However since the data needs to be pulled from Googles system, access time will be slow when compared to that of physical system.
Every time, when a user creates a new file and stores it in his GMail Drive, an email is created and sent to the account. It appears as a normal email with an attachment. In order to lessen the cluttering of mails in my inbox I have created a filter using GMails plus addressing, and this will automatically archive all the files.
We need to be aware of the fact that GMail Drive is still an experimental tool and and is not endorsed by Google. There are some small glitches like we cannot have file names more than 40 characters. Since GMail drive is a third party tool, any change in GMail or googles policy everything can break. This is one of the main reason it’s not advisable to store anything important there but otherwise its one of the best tools.