Gmail inspires imaginative ‘hacks’

A number of ingenious uses for Google’s capacious free email service Gmail have surfaced since the service’s launch.

Gmail was created by the web search company Google in April 2004 amid much excitement as every user is promised an unprecedented gigabyte of storage space for messages. Google encourages users to keep all their old messages and automatically searches these to determine what kind of web advertisements might interest users.

But Gmail’s copious storage space has inspired a number of programmers to come up with completely novel ways of using the service.

These include a ‘weblog’ or online message board that uses Gmail to store postings and a desktop file system that plugs straight into the Gmail system.