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Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

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Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#81
post #15

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.

Try using it on an iPhone, where the site interprets any sort of horizontal swipes (such as ones you might make while zooming in and panning on some text) as an intention to go to the next/previous article in the blog.

I just tried that on my iPhone 4 and it rendered the post OK. Horizontal swiping didn't seem to do anything.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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!

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

I appreciate you being "that guy" :)

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#84
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IIRC, 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.

Once 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?

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#85
post #43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Although bandwidth and storage have greatly been raised, the scaling problem remains: send a single email with the usual limit of 10MB to 20 recipients, and it will balloon to 200MB total at some point, possibly multiple times even. Scale this up, and you've quickly got a problem. What's more, either you put on limits or become a target for volume-filling D…

Also don't forget that attachments are usually base64 encoded which increases the size by 33%.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#86
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.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#87
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a discussion about this at work a few months back, someone suggested to me that part of Google's motivation might be to increase the cost of entry for search competitors. No longer can you just scrape a page and index it: not one of the 22 KB served at that URL actually contains the text of the page. To scrape one of those awful pages, you need to JavaScript interpreter and a DOM - a headless browser, really. Unle…

Getting a headless browser up and running really isn't that huge of a hurdle if you're capable enough to build a search engine whose intent is to be competitive with Google.

It's not technically hard, no. However, there's an overhead in running a headless browser, of memory, CPU, time, and bandwidth, so it might cost substantially more.

You don't need a browser for everything, but working out which pages need a headless browser and which you can get away with scraping sounds like an interesting problem.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#88

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.

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.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#89
post #21

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.

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

Hah. You silly young'uns. The internet has always been represented by a cloud. If his server is attached to the internet, it's part of said cloud.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#90

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

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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