Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files
gmailblog.blogspot.com
gmailblog.blogspot.com
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'.
It doesn't matter. I know already what it's about: more ways to get locked-in the "google-verse".
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.
Why make a website and not test it on your own ecosystem? Sometimes I don't get Google.
Not only do I have to disable no-script to see any content, but then the page usurps my back button taking me somewhere I don't want to go.
For a company that makes neato flip-book-web3.0-page-turny stuff so well, they sure do fall flat on the blog thing.
/me moves cursor over to the scroll bar only to be intercepted by a pop-up menu containing a logo, helpfully labelled "Logo".
Oh.
wtf
A blogger logo. That's it. That's where the link leads. To blogger logo.
You have to make sure the article body has the keyboard focus first though (e.g. by clicking somewhere on the text); it would be nice if they'd somehow arrange for that to happen by default...
I'm not entirely convinced, but I've heard worse conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.
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.
Seems like the wrong direction in an increasingly mobile world, feels like this stuff is either tested on very specific mobile devices or not at all.
When I feel compelled to read such a page, I haul it up from Google's cache. (Firefox has an extension to click-ify that. And, fortunately, Google cache functionality is not all ueber-Javascripted -- yet.)
To cut to the chase: These templates are designed for the sake of Google, not users.
I suggest both you readers and users of blogspot do the same.
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.
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.
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 ...
If that's the case, though, seems like I should start looking into alternative email providers....
Because they want their users to be able to communicate with Outlook users?
You are talking nonsense, they obviously need to play nice with other email hostings/clients; and with this new way of sending files it let their users know that they are two different ways of sending data; that is not really an email attachment but a link to your file in the cloud; a distinction that many times matter.
And they can't give the amount space they give in Drive to every gmail account; why would they do that? Better to be a different service that only the people interested in that kind of big cloud storage will take.
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.
A lot of the hang up may have remained from that.
I remember the days when it would take 20 minutes to download an mp3 only for it to drop out in the final minute. Grrr!
Add to that what lloeki said, it's probably one of the most important reason. I becomes very easy to take down several servers at the same time!
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 DoS, and whatever limit you put on will be used and abused (ever seen those professional PPTs filled with ridiculously sized, uncompressed BMPs?).
So when sending big files email basically becomes a form of push signalling mechanism, where voluminous resources can be pulled on demand. Maybe a standardization of this process is in order instead of everyone coming up with its body-embedded HTML presentation mimicking regular file attachments? Something like a multipart message with mime type application/email-attachment-uri, which would make it nice to text-only modes.
BTW this really looks like what's currently implemented in Sparrow with CloudApp or Dropbox.
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!
I appreciate you being "that guy" :)
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.
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).
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.
Does google drive impose similar restrictions?
I wanted to email my tax data to my accountant. So, I made a self-extracting PGP archive several megabytes in size. Gmail wouldn't let me send it until I tacked on .remove after the .exe extension.
It's not really an unreasonable thing, IMO. Google is just making sure the file won't run semi-automatically upon being downloaded. Ending in a random extension prevents that, since the user has to deliberately rename the file first.
golf clapping
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.
Hmm, how much space do I have in there now?
0% of 5 GB used... Now it makes sense.
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.
- 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.
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.
disclaimer: I work for a Google competitor
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.
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.
Much like Web 2.0, cloud doesn't have a technical definition.
> There's an important difference, and people need to stop using them interchangeably.
People need to stop using "cloud" altogether.
(However if I own a couple/few of these boxes at different sites and they all sync up to store things redundantly then the line is blurred just a bit. The Synology devices are certainly capable of that.)
There are certain things I do host within my own ftp server, but I just use my web host which I have 10GB of disk space but am only using maybe 10 meg for my personal site. I wouldn't go to the extent of my own server unless it was a real business requirement, I'd be fine just putting on Dropbox/Google and if it was sensitive info then I would encrypt the files first - either 7zip or Truecrypt.
The sharing features were then enabled with a few clicks on the appliance's locally hosted (ExtJS) web application. This step was much less work than going around to every PC in the home and office installing Dropbox.
Usage-wise, I find it to be less work to share something via my Synology than with Dropbox, particularly because A) I don't need any special software to share something from any computer in the world, B) most of the time my files arrive instantly and C) there are no limits to the size of files that I can share. When I was still using Dropbox, I'd hit that limit often enough to make it a PITA to use.