CloudStore
· 2007-11-18 22:49 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET
This weekend I hacked together a small app to easily save files as attachments in your GMail mailbox. Or technically, this app could upload files to any IMAP4 compatible server. For now it’s just GMail, and that’s the only service I tested it with.
The (very beta, of course) application has been made available for your enjoyment:
Download CloudStoreOf course all disclaimers apply, such as "Use at your own risk". If it f*cks up your harddrive or mailbox, then that’s too bad for you!
(This application is IWOMM certified)
I thought it would be nice to distribute the application using ClickOnce deployment. This way you will get a the new version as soon as I publish it! Because I run this website on a Linux server with apache, I needed to add one line to my .htaccess file to make sure the deployment also works in IE6.
To make apache associate the CloudStore.application file with the right mime type you need to add the following line to the .htaccess file:
AddType application/x-ms-application .application
So how do you use CloudStore?
First you need to enable IMAP4 support on your GMail mailbox. To do this go to the GMail "Settings" page, then to the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab. There you can enable IMAP Access. If you can’t see these options, it might help to switch your mailbox language to English (US). (The option was missing in the Dutch version of GMail but appeared as soon as I selected English)
Next you download, install and run CloudStore by visiting the install page.
Finally, you just punch in your GMail email address as the username, and your password in the password box. Then you use the ellipsis button (with the "...") to select a file. Finally you hit "Send" and there it goes! The white box at the bottom will spit out all kinds of debugging information (this is a beta, remember?).
If all goes well the file will show up as an attachment to a mail message under the "CloudStore" tag in your mailbox.
What’s next?
I hope to be able to expand CloudStore using the Microsoft Sync Framework, so it will be possible to backup an entire folder (or even disk) to your mailbox. For this I’ll have to think about several things:
- How to store a folder hierarchy in email messages?
- How to split up file that are too large for one message? (Maybe just split them up? but then you can’t download them using a regular (web-)mail client)
Now uploading is easy, I also want to add downloading to the app, to get the full email-as-disk experience.
If time permits, there will be more soon, stay tuned ;)
