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When GMail launched, there was loads of wrappers people wrote to use it as a file store instead of E-Mail, because it was so much for the time....

But now E-Mail, like the rest of the internet is so damn heavy, 1GB gets eaten up in no time.

GMailFS! The Google File System! Such a novel idea at the time to let Google back up all our stuff...

... and then 20 years later I wonder how much of a mistake that was.

i remember using gspace as a firefox plugin to store stuff in my gmail account. it's probably still there in my 20 years old emails.

funnily enough, if it was possible to find the source code of that plugin somewhere, i could probably tell some LLM to cook up some tool to find all such emails and extract the files.

I got my first gmail account in April 2004 (!)

Now it’s clearly time to move on.

I remember them releasing it on an 1st of april l, we were all: Great joke. Then it turns out they were serious. That was some smart marketing.