GMail: online backup, pop3, money making machine

OFFER SOMETHING too good and people will flock to it. That's what happened with GMail. The other alternatives, Yahoo, Hotmail and the like have so many limitations and annoyances that people followed that age-old advice of "run, don't walk" and have snagged their GMail accounts, often at any cost.

I was invited to try out Gmail by Google and have used the service for the last few weeks and I've been very pleased with it. If you look at the HTML/Javascript source code you see a lot of "IFs" in there to branch accordingly if you are using Mozilla, Safari, and at some points depending on the operating system. That's a very nice consideration, and not a surprise coming from Google, a company with so far no operating system selling agenda.

About the usually mentioned privacy concerns, let me say that technically, nothing currently prevents any of the established "free webmail" providers from snooping your writings, if they really want to. And that's leaving aside the "brute force" sniffing of all e-mail traffic that might be going on on a global scale by the government funded spy agencies. Heard of Echelon?

I hype, you hype, Gmail hype

The Washington Post has run a story about a 15-year old wise guy who started the GMail invitations selling craze, and claims to have pocketed a thousand greenbacks with the scheme. Apparently someone paid $102.50 for a GMail account, making it his best sale so far (consider that the cost of obtaining the initial invitation can be zero).

The writer of the WP story claimed "he's got the right instincts and he's still young enough". The right instincts?. That's his opinion. It will be sad if Gmail opens officially and you find that the only email address you can get is fdxwrtty72@gmail.com because every other human-readable combination has been taken. "No police cars have shown up yet," wiz kid Spencer is quoted as saying.

I bet that TV freaks like myself remember that funny Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit where in the middle of the dotcom-craze they did a TV advert parody: a Law firm talked about their skills, honesty, tradition, and values... showing images of plenty of handshakes and smiling men and women in suits, only to end with the firm's url, read by a serious voice-over: www.clownpenis.fart ("it's the only spare, human-readable domain name we could find", -or words to that effect- the voice over offered as an apology).

Plenty of storage, e-mail land grab, worried competitors... what can come next? Think pop3 access, whether the company likes it or not. This is hardly news to Hotmail and Yahoo customers. Proxy programs that allow users to get their Hotmail and Yahoo US free e-mail over pop3 have been available for a long time.

"MrPostman" is one such program. Small, and written in cross-platform Java, sporting an attractive GUI, it can be run on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Unix, OS/2, you name it. Find the program here. Sadly, it doesn't currently support GMail.

The "beauty" of Microsoft's .net ?

But as you imagine, someone had to do the same for GMail. Called "pgtgm" (Pop goes the GMail), this windows-only proxy-like program that allows you to use any pop3 email program with your GMail "web-only" account, that is, it works like MrPostman, acting as a pop3 server to your email program (which you have to point to localhost, 127.0.0.1 as the server), and then, the program fetches the messages one by one over a http connection). Heard of the "middleware" buzzword?? Well, this would be it.

The program needs the .Net Framework installed first (a 20-MB download), and some have called the resulting program a memory hog: "downloading 20meg framework to run 73k program is really justifable (sic)" wondered one user in the NeoWin forums. "Doesn't work, and uses 45mb of ram" said another. In the defense of the program, another dot-net advocate replied: "as for 45 meg of ram, thats just the way .NET apps work. they allocate ram in advance".

"This program does not steal passwords and send them to me. Source code will be available to prove this when development has progressed" said the author. So far, I checked his site and source code is still not available. Caveat Emptor. Find the thread about PGTGM here

I just hope someone with enough time adds GMail compatibility to the cross-platform, Java2 based Mr.Postman.

Next step: GMail as Online Backup

Of course, with 1GB of space, you can e-mail files to yourself for "online storage", but that is a boring job. So someone created a script to automate the "upload" and "retrieval" of files to and from GMail. Find the PHP, cross-platform script here. See the beauty of open source? I can even do file backups from my os/2 system... :)

Of course it didn't surprise me at all to find the script used Libcurl, the open source library (sister of the command-line utility Curl) that I've been using for a long time, and which can make creating scripts that behave like scripted web browsers extremely pleasing (Curl and Libcurl can identify to web servers as normal web browsers, full with the right user-agent, the right referrer, and built-in cookie management, making them almost impossible to differentiate (from the server side) from a Human Being clicking buttons in IE).

The author writes about his script writing excercise "Since most of the e-mail going to that (GMail) account ended up being removed by spam filters, the account ended being rather empty, which seems rather wasteful. So, I've come up with a quick utility to make use of at least a small portion of the available space for backup purposes".

He continues: "To accomplish this task I wrote a small PHP script that can be used to backup files to Gmail and then quickly retrieve them back if and when you need them. I trust that Gmail servers are fairly reliable, and this offers an excellent off site backup that is extremely fast (I can max out my connection on download 300k/sec) and accessible from anywhere internet is available"

What GMail will think of this remains to be seen. Personally, I think it would be very difficult for GMail to implement any type of block on the amount of email you can receive (after all if you end up eating all available space in a few months or weeks, it's your loss). Equally difficult would be to put any limit on the number of messages you can send manually to yourself, which is a practice I've been enjoying for the last 10 years as a quick url-backup solution.

GMail instant messaging?

Another user attempted to sell on eBay - with poor results - an apparently unfinished (at least not compiled) "GMail instant messenger". If you think about it... it would be even possible to adapt the backup script mentioned above to use GMail as a (rather slow, obviously) instant messaging delivery system (with 1GB of backup of the conversations). Find his auction here.

Entire web sites dedicated to talking about GMail have appeared, as well. In one of these there is talk about whether or not should Google get into Instant Messaging (like Yahoo and Microsoft, and AOL and...). Find it here So what will be the next GMail based trick? Agree or disagree with me?, let me know what you think. µ