Hacking up Gmail.

I went to a friend’s place yesterday and within minutes found myself staring at the computer there (family friend, not mine exactly). I would have loved to listen to my music there as this guy’s hard rock ( soft/hard rock are oxymorons ) bugs me. I wanted to listen to Kitaro’s instrumental music or Billy Joel’s albums. I began clicking on the inbox link in Gmail over and over again expecting an interesting mail to come by. The interesting thing is that this guy has Linux installed ( Fedora ) but uses it once a month as it gives him a headache ( Anger !! ). A thought struck me then. What if I could store my mp3s in my gmail inbox ? I could then listen to them wherever I wanted to !

One google search later, I found gmailfs - a cool app that allows me to mount my gmail inbox on a local directory.

Back home, I installed gmailfs from the repos, edited /etc/gmailfs/gmailfs.conf to put my username and password there and I did:

mount.gmailfs none /mnt/google

Thats it ! I can now access my Gmail inbox from my shell.
Gmailfs was created by Richard Jones. This is a brilliant creation.

I believe that Gmailfs is needed, not because one wants to show off one’s python skills, but that my inbox is never going to face storage issues, despite the fact that I get 100 KB sized emails from comp.lang.python and comp.sys.ibm.pc.storage on a daily basis.  A gig is a lot of space. I can use this enormous space (Greedy ) to store stuff like my scripts or my mp3 files so that I can listen to them everywhere.