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Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files
- facorreia 14y agoSeems very useful. I bet I'll be using that a lot.
- stephengillie 14y agoSorry for being pessimistic, but any speculation on the vulnerabilities this connection opens?
- ceejayoz 14y agoNo more than the years-old sharing features in Google Docs/Drive, I'd imagine.
- stephenhuey 14y agoThis is long overdue. I've been inserting links to Google Docs (the old name for Drive files) into emails forever, but plenty of people I know don't realize how easily they can do that and give up if a large file cannot be attached to an email. I'm also surprised by how many Gmail-using friends of mine don't even know there's some hefty free file storage a click away even though the link to it has been at the top of their Gmail for years.
- agumonkey 14y agoI wonder if this will cause storage optimisations on their data centers.
- munin 14y ago> Have you ever tried to attach a file to an email only to find out it's too large to send? Yeah! Some jerk who runs my MTA set the size of acceptable attachments really low! I wonder who did that... $ host -t mx mydomain.com mydomain.com mail is handled by 0 aspmx.l.google.com. Oh... I see.
- notatoad 14y agoAttachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Sending large files around between web clients is okay, but if you send a large file to an outlook user they're going to have to sit there waiting for it to download before the rest of their email comes in. And then it's going to make their PST file exceed the maximum PST file size, which in a poorly managed system (i.e. most personal computers) is going to cause data loss. Also, my parents used to use an ISP-provided email address, and it would silently drop any messages that included a file that exceeded their maximum attachment size. So any time i tried to send them photos, they'd never get the email. Limiting attachments to a fairly small size is just being a good citizen of the email network.
- suprfsat 14y agoAnd the users get really mad at Exchange and Outlook, and they complain to their administrators, and they switch to Google Apps.
- munin 14y agoOh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they). Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...
- chimeracoder 14y agoHow often are you syncing? I use offlineimap and haven't noticed any issues. If that's the case, though, seems like I should start looking into alternative email providers....
- simonsarris 14y agoThis is lovely. Very welcome. Sending and sharing files are two of those things that are just now sluggishly rolling over to discover that it's a new millennium. Dropbox and Drive are making great strides lately and I'm really thankful for it. Using Dropbox to have the same "folder" across three computers is the first time synced sharing ever felt intuitive enough for my (71 year old) father to regularly use, and now he can use this to reliably send larger files to people without any worry of fouling up permissions (that would otherwise be difficult for him to understand).
- mitko 14y agoplug: my friend built a chrome extension that does a superset of that - it is called Cloudy and integrates with filepicker.io which lets you choose files from multiple cloud storages: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloudy/fcfnjfpcmnoabmbhponbioedjceaddaa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloudy/fcfnjfpcmno... disclaimer: I work for a Google competitor
- yason 14y agoThis is how email could work too. The sender would host it (by himself or in cloud) and the recipients go fetch it when they want to read it. Updates and comment threads all collect into the same place. No spam either since nobody would be pushing tens of megabytes of messages to your inbox.
- bajsejohannes 14y agoWell, you could always just paste a good old URL.
- Sidnicious 14y agoIt’s cool in a lot of ways, but there are two big disadvantages over traditional attachments: - The recipient doesn’t get a static copy of the file to keep alongside the email. - The sender’s responsible for keeping the file available until the recipient has seen/saved it.
- eagsalazar2 14y agothose are both advantages in plenty of situations. Just depends on what you want in a given situation.
- danbarker 14y agoI've been paying for Google Drive for several months because I really, really want it to work, but it's actually kinda useless as it causes constant instability and 120%+ CPU load on my 2012 Macbook Pro. This means that I frequently close the application down, so it's not actually covering me and if I lost my computer, the most recent files probably wouldn't be covered. There's been an open issue about this in the support forums for months and there's no news on when they're going to fix it...
- Lewisham 14y agoI switched to Arq with Glacier as my "House Burns Down" backup, as I already backup to a Time Machine external drive at home. I'm very happy with it, but of course, I've never tried to get the data back yet.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> I'm very happy with it, but of course, I've never tried to get the data back yet. Not to be that guy, but... if you don't have a tested restoration plan for a backup, you don't have a backup! Nothing's worse than losing all your data with no backup... except for losing all your data and going to restore from your backup, only to find that all your data there is gone as well!
- Lewisham 14y agoAgreed. When Arq finishes its backup, I'll do a verification. I appreciate you being "that guy" :)
- ry0ohki 14y agoI uninstalled Google Drive myself... I just don't "get it", it doesn't seem to work as well as Dropbox, and it's kind of cool I can see my Google Docs, but organizing them in Drive doesn't appear to organize them in the "Drive" link of my Gmail, etc...
- jxi 14y agoYea, the native clients suck, but then again Google was never known for making solid desktop apps (it's not really in their DNA after all). I have similar experiences as you, so I use it purely from my web browser now. The website has gotten more functional and easy to use lately.
- guelo 14y agoTotally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.
- majorlazer 14y agoI actually really like it. What don't you like about it?
- czr80 14y agoFor a start... how about the stupid menu that pops up when I try to use the scroll bar? A stupid menu that actually has an entry titled "Logo", with a "I love blogger" graphic? What the heck is that supposed to mean?
- pavel_lishin 14y agoCompletely and totally breaks instapaper.
- chimeracoder 14y agoI despise this new trend, and it kills me that Google seems to be embracing it more and more. Google Groups is the worst offender for me - it completely breaks my browser's keybindings for going backwards, so every time I'm, eg. searching Googling a bug and open a mailing list archive to find an answer to a bug, I inevitably end up collapsing the thread each and every time, when what I really want is just to go back to the search results. I don't want every Google website to have its own tiling window manager within the page - that's what my OS is for! Of course, they have no intention of fixing this, it seems. Disabling Javascript just yields an error message - 'Please turn on Javascript to view this page'.
- Nux 14y agoUhh, but it's so shiny!1 Why u not like it?? http://img.nux.ro/n9H-fsckblogspot.png http://img.nux.ro/n9H-fsckblogspot.png It doesn't matter. I know already what it's about: more ways to get locked-in the "google-verse".
- tedmiston 14y agoA welcome feature, but we can't ignore the paradigm shift's tiny repercussion: once the sender deletes the file, the receiver will no longer be able to access it (assuming they've lost, deleted, or not yet downloaded their own copy). Lately I've used shared Dropbox folder links for larger attachments, but the same problem seems to persist with any hosted solution. A solution that pleases both the sender having control over their files and the receiver having long-term access is tough to imagine.
- tonfa 14y agoCan you make a copy in google drive?
- Nitramp 14y agoYes, File->Create a copy.
- nilved 14y ago> A solution that pleases both the sender having control over their files and the receiver having long-term access is tough to imagine. It's that paradoxical? Having control of the file means being able to revoke access to it. If the viewer has long-term access, the owner doesn't have control.
- tedmiston 14y agoI agree with your statement. I should be more precise: the gap will appear in the layman's approach. For example, A: "Hey remember that file you sent me a while ago? I can't access it anymore." B: "Oh, I deleted it." A: "But I thought it was an attachment?" B: "Well..."
- WayneDB 14y agoI never liked the idea of hosting my own files on someone else's server (Dropbox) or sending them through a middle-man. That's why i just run my own "cloud" on my own premises. If I want to give someone access to a file, I just throw it on my Synology DiskStation and the receiver can get at it via FTP or HTTP client.
- zacharycohn 14y agoThat's not a "cloud," that's just a server. There's an important difference, and people need to stop using them interchangeably.
- radarsat1 14y agoWhat is the difference?
- Achshar 14y agoI believe cloud by definition means third party, but something like the host wont know what it is storing, just who accesses it. So in OP's case if his computer is shutdown, the server wont be able to serve the file, but if it is on "cloud" there is a lot less chance of downtime and greater latency as "cloud" can have multiple data centers around the globe to server same file.
- eccoli 14y agoI believe it's worse than that. Since as long as I remember and probably even before that, when explaining networking to executives, marketing and other technically challenged people, we use drawings. In these drawings the part representing the internet is for some reason drawn as a cloud, probably to convey that some magic we don't want to get into the deatils happens there. Now you've got it, the cloud, a.k.a. the internet symbol for ignorant people.
- irahul 14y ago> That's not a "cloud," that's just a server. Much like Web 2.0, cloud doesn't have a technical definition. > There's an important difference, and people need to stop using them interchangeably. People need to stop using "cloud" altogether.
- kamakazizuru 14y agothis is awesome! it might also just tip the scales from dropbox over to drive. I cant believe something so obviously powerful took so long! I do hope that it will allow me to share files with non-gmail users as well!
- csmatt 14y agoIt's about time! I use Google's cloud-based services for as much as I can, but it's still not seamless and is annoying when I have to open a new window to access a service run by the same company providing the one in the page I'm on. Next step: Please allow me to easily save PDF's and other documents directly to Drive from a URL. I shouldn't have to download a file to my device and then upload it to drive.
- telcodud 14y agoIf you use cloudprint (link: http://www.google.com/cloudprint http://www.google.com/cloudprint), you can already save PDFs or any other URL directly to Google Drive. I use this all the time to save online confirmations, receipts, etc.
- fudged71 14y agoQuestion: so with this, I can send an attachment and change the file before the recipient opens it? Will they see if it has been modified? Will I see when they have accessed it?
- crb 14y agoThis is an automated way to do what was previously "copy and paste a Google Docs link into an e-mail". Yes, you can change the file. If it's in native Google format (e.g. a Google Doc, not an uploaded/stored Word .doc file) you have a revision history. You can see when people join/leave the document while it's open (without timestamps), but you can't bring that up later.
- ivanb 14y agoIs this minuscule feature worth the front page?
- kissickas 14y ago> Now with Drive, you can insert files up to 10GB Hmm, how much space do I have in there now? 0% of 5 GB used... Now it makes sense.
- revelation 14y agoSo can we use that to send binaries to people? Because gmail will absolutely not allow you do that. They will go as far as inspecting archives to look for binaries and ban you from sending them.
- whyleyc 14y agoYou can get around this by renaming the file to have some arbitrary image extension. Not ideal, but works.
- kamjam 14y agoOr zip it up with something like 7zip, encrypt it with a password and tell it to encrypt the filenames as well so Google can't peek inside :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Wingman4l7 14y agoIIRC, you can also just strip the file extension altogether. I had to send some DLLs once -- that was a pain. I think the only thing that ended up working was zipping them and stripping the .zip extension off the file.
- rijoja 14y agoOnce I wanted to send a zip file of malicious php files. Google (correctly) identified them as harmful. It wouldn't allow me to send them even though I tried to pack them into zip, tar.gz and tar.bz2 files. In the end I wrote a script that rot13 encoded the files and was able to send the files. Does google drive impose similar restrictions?
- cynwoody 14y agoThat is true. I wanted to email my tax data to my accountant. So, I made a self-extracting PGP archive several megabytes in size. Gmail wouldn't let me send it until I tacked on .remove after the .exe extension. It's not really an unreasonable thing, IMO. Google is just making sure the file won't run semi-automatically upon being downloaded. Ending in a random extension prevents that, since the user has to deliberately rename the file first.
- goronbjorn 14y agoThere is a really good third-party Chrome extension that effectively does this already and also works with Box and Dropbox: https://attachments.me/ https://attachments.me/
- gregd 14y agoI LOVE attachments.me! I have it set up to automatically store attachments from certain folks to a dropbox folder. I only wish it worked with MailPlane...
- benaiah 14y agoSo, in other words, Gmail just added a feature that Hotmail/Outlook.com have had for years. golf clapping
- cenit 14y agoyes. Exactly... But, you know, now it's done by Google... Anyway, I'm surprised that no-one except you cited skydrive and the fact that they just copied a feature so old for many users...
- kexek 14y agoWould be perfect if they add this Google Drive attachments functionality to Sparrow. Someday.
- paulirish 14y agoI've been dogfooding the "Gmail will double-check that your recipients all have access to any files you’re sending" feature for a month now and it's FANTASTIC. If you use Google Docs a lot, this saves so much permission pingpong.
- brettkw 14y agoHonestly Gmail's new features never cease to amaze me. Their new compose box is a good example. Initially it was terrible for me as I frequently send from other email addresses but within a week they had removed a click or two and now it's perfect.
- dmd 14y agoI'm very impressed with how fast that other-email-address UI issue was fixed.
- jdbevan 14y agoIs no-one else worried about these TOS applying to their email attachments? you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). EDIT: I guess it's a moot point if you're already using Gmail.