
Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files - neya
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/gmail-and-drive-new-way-to-send-files.html
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guelo
Totally 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.

~~~
chimeracoder
I 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'.

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anigbrowl
I totally agree. Not only does it disrupt bindings and make pages slow to
load, but at least once a day Chrome now freezes when I do a Google search -
the results page loads, but I can't click on anything and if I scroll down the
bottom of the page hasn't been rendered at all. Nothing for it but to reboot
Chrome 3 times (it dies silently the first two).

I still love Google overall (so yay on mailing big files and yay on Gmail
generally), but the endless feature creep is a weakness, not a strength.

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munin
> 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.

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notatoad
Attachment 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.

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munin
Oh 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 ...

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hurstdog
I'm not sure why you're getting those quota errors, but I can assure you that
we're not trying to pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP.

If you post on the forums, some user support folks should be able to help you
out and escalate to engineering if they find you're hitting a bug.

Sorry for the issues you're seeing.

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danbarker
I'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...

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Lewisham
I 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.

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chimeracoder
> 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!

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Lewisham
Agreed. When Arq finishes its backup, I'll do a verification.

I appreciate you being "that guy" :)

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stephenhuey
This 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.

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tedmiston
A 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.

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nilved
> 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.

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tedmiston
I 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..."

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simonsarris
This 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).

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revelation
So 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.

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whyleyc
You can get around this by renaming the file to have some arbitrary image
extension. Not ideal, but works.

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kamjam
Or 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 :)

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benaiah
So, in other words, Gmail just added a feature that Hotmail/Outlook.com have
had for years.

 _golf clapping_

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cenit
yes. 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...

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csmatt
It'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.

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telcodud
If you use cloudprint (link: <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.

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kissickas
> 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.

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dannyr
You can pay and get more space.

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kissickas
Sorry for the late reply... that is what I was implying. They are offering
this to sell more storage space.

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jdbevan
Is 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.

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paulirish
I'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.

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brettkw
Honestly 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.

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dmd
I'm very impressed with how fast that other-email-address UI issue was fixed.

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ivanb
Is this minuscule feature worth the front page?

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yason
This 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.

~~~
Sidnicious
It’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.

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eagsalazar2
those are both advantages in plenty of situations. Just depends on what you
want in a given situation.

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kamakazizuru
this 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!

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goronbjorn
There is a really good third-party Chrome extension that effectively does this
already and also works with Box and Dropbox: <https://attachments.me/>

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gregd
I 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...

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fudged71
Question: 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?

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crb
This 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.

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mitko
plug: 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/fcfnjfpcmno...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloudy/fcfnjfpcmnoabmbhponbioedjceaddaa)

disclaimer: I work for a Google competitor

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kexek
Would be perfect if they add this Google Drive attachments functionality to
Sparrow. Someday.

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agumonkey
I wonder if this will cause storage optimisations on their data centers.

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WayneDB
I 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.

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zacharycohn
That's not a "cloud," that's just a server. There's an important difference,
and people need to stop using them interchangeably.

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radarsat1
What is the difference?

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Achshar
I 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.

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eccoli
I 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.

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facorreia
Seems very useful. I bet I'll be using that a lot.

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stephengillie
Sorry for being pessimistic, but any speculation on the vulnerabilities this
connection opens?

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ceejayoz
No more than the years-old sharing features in Google Docs/Drive, I'd imagine.

