The Hindu : Business : Web mailbox as remote storage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 15, 2004

Business

Business

Web mailbox as remote storage

THIS WEEK NetSpeak features an awesome tool that enables you to use your web mail account for storing/sharing files.

A significant consequence of the Google mail service, Gmail, is that it induced several Web mail service providers to give away huge mailboxes to their users. To help a netizen use this large storage space effectively, many tools are surfacing on the Net that let her convert the mailbox space into an on-line virtual drive for storing/sharing large files. An obvious advantage of storing data on an on-line drive is that one can access it anytime from anywhere on the Net.

In this context, regular readers of this column may recall the Gmail drive software mentioned in an earlier edition of NetSpeak. The Gmail Drive (http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) program creates a virtual drive around your Gmail account, which can be used to store documents just like other local drives.

Peer2Mail

The free software `Peer2Mail' (P2M) is another more generic product created to exploit the massive storage space available on your web mail accounts. P2M can also be used to `store and share files on your web-mail account.'

The program allows you to send the files to your web mail account just like you send a mail to it. Prior to sending a large file, P2M splits it into small segments and then sends them one by one. The files stored on to a web mail account in this manner can later be downloaded by anyone on the Net with P2M installed on her machine.

To use the product to store a file, invoke it and access the option Split/Send File. Now, select the file to be stored using the icon `Choose a File to send.' Here, you will have to provide details such as mail-id of your web mail account and name of the file to be stored on this account. Before sending the file (using the icon `Send the segments'), make sure that the `SMTP server settings' are done properly.

Once all the segments are sent over to your web mail account, they can be downloaded from any machine with P2M. To download the file segments, first you need to log-on to your web mail account through P2M's `Browse' interface. At this point, click on the `Download Segments' icon for downloading the file segments on to your drive. P2M will list out all the segment groups available on your mail server. Select the groups you need and download the segments.

Once all the segments of a file are downloaded, you can assemble them into its original form using the P2M's `Merge Segments' feature.

As per its site (http://www.peer2mail.com/), currently P2M supports web mail services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Walla! Please note that this author has tested the tool only with mail services such as Yahoo and Walla! (http://www.walla.com/), which gives a free 1GB mail account. Also, if the web mail providers do not agree with the concept of using the mail account as a virtual storage, P2M like tools may not last long.

Google has grown beyond from just being a search engine and along with its great search service, the versatile company hosts a wide array of useful services that include Google print, Google news, Google alerts, Google images and so on. Naturally, an ordinary netizen will find it a little difficult to use these services without enough support materials.

Google Help Central's `Google Help: Cheat Sheet' (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.) is an excellent page to consult, whenever you need some quick tips to use Google's services. This single-page help sheet contains almost all Google commands with examples. Take a print out and keep it on your desk. Apart from the Google cheat sheet mentioned above, many quick reference guides or cheat sheets that deal with a wide range of subjects/services/products are in place. Some useful cheat sheets:

`Internet Cheat sheet' with tips to browse the Net efficiently (http://webjunction.org/do/Dis playContent?id=1329).

HTML Cheat Sheet that presents popular HTML tags (http://info-x.co.uk/docview.asp ?id=90).

Grammar cheat sheet that explains common grammatical errors: http://www.xeromag.com/ cheat.html. You may also check out the page `Favourite Cheat sheets' (http://tinyurl.com/64pjk) that lists out links to popular cheat sheets.

If you are researcher/academician/scientist, you need to interact with others for enriching your knowledge and disseminating your ideas. Attending seminars, publishing papers and the like are some obvious methods to do this. As tens of hundreds of announcements for seminars and calls for publishing papers occur worldwide, one may find it difficult to keep up with the latest developments. An on-line service that collects/categorises all such announcements and makes them available to its users will certainly be quite handy.

The PapersINVITED database service of Business One, Inc., which hosts the database of `Calls for Papers' from "journals, conferences and professional bodies in all disciplines'' across the world, is one such service worth a visit. For a trial version: http://www.papersinvited.com/ default.asp.

Speaking search service

Many search services with some unique features are in place. The search service Speegle (http://speegle.co.uk/) is another one of this kind worth a test. Apart from listing out the search results, Speegle reads out the results for you (of course you need a headphone or speaker to use this service). By pressing the number that corresponds to a site in the list, you can access it. The feature that makes this service really useful is the `NewsFeeds' section that reads out news summaries from the feed selected by you.

Free Tech Books

For free books on computer science and programming, check out: http://techbooksforfree.com/. Here, you will find links to books related to subjects such as Linux, Java, Database, Python, Networking and Security. The service also provides an RSS news feed that can be used to keep abreast with the new postings on the site.

J. Murali

Email the author at:murali27@satyam.net.in

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