March 1, 2007
Saving Executables as Drafts in Gmail
Steve Rubel’s post, Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center, has some pretty good ideas, and he turned me on to the new “Send To” button on the Google Toolbar. I now save dozens of articles and pictures to Gmail every week, which I filter by labels and automatically archive. It’s especially important to save those NYTimes articles that will foolishly disappear into a pay-per-view archive in 30 days (WSJ: 90 days).
New! Send To
You can use your Google Toolbar to share web pages via email, text message (SMS), or blog. To share an entire page, select from the Toolbar’s “Send To” menu; to share an excerpt, simply select the section of the page you want to share before clicking “Send To.”Note: sending text messages via the Google Toolbar is free. Your cell phone carrier, however, may charge a fee to receive messages, on either a monthly or per-message basis.
Another valuable thing I learned from that Rubel post was a comment left by “Larry.”
Power uses of ‘Drafts’:
1. I create ‘new mail’ and type/organize notes on projects that are continually evolving … never send them … they just get stored in ‘drafts’.
2. I create ‘new mail’ and attach files that gmail will NOT send… e.g. *.exe files, etc. Fine, ….. don’t send it … just leave is stored as a draft ……. Then regardsless where you go …….office, home, …..on the road….. you have access to all the ‘files’ that you could want and not use up valuable space on your 2GB USB drives.
Regards,…Larry
Brilliant, thanks Larry!
March 6th, 2007 at 12:48 am
There is a Firefox add-on that allows you to access your Gmail storage space much easier than the roundabout method of attaching files to draft messages. Here is the link
March 6th, 2007 at 8:15 am
maple: Thanks for the tip. I used Gspace long ago before it was a Firefox extension and it was very unstable, but maybe now they’ve worked the kinks out. I’ll give this extension a shot and maybe update the post if I like it.
March 6th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
maple: I’ve been fooling with Gspace and I find the Send To on the Google Toolbar much handier than saving the html or jpg files first then uploading them. Am I missing something here?
March 6th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I don’t use the Google toolbar myself, but I don’t doubt that it is handier for saving full web pages. I was only referring to GSpace’s ease of use for storing individual files to access on the road compared to the more cumbersome method of creating, attaching and saving draft messages. (Of course, the draft message method is better if you don’t carry your laptop with you and need to access the files from someone else’s PC without Firefox/GSpace).
March 6th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
maple: Yeah, now I understand what you were saying. In the not too distant future I expect that there will be tens of millions of “dumb” terminals around the world (kind of like phone booths in the past) and everything will be network-based. No more lugging around the laptop.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:12 am
[…] Nowadays I always bookmark an article I like to delicious. Frequently I use the Google Toolbar “Send To” function to save the same article in my Gmail “database.” And lastly I often want to Digg the article if I think it deserves it. Shouldn’t I be able to do all three things with a single click? Why do I have to futz around doing these things separately? […]