So I’ve finally got Gmail’s Insert Files using Drive feature, which lets you attach files from your Google Drive into mails. Drive gives you 5GB of cloud storage for free, so now you can attach files with size up to 5GB. Earlier the maximum size of an attachment was 25MB. To check if you’ve got the feature by now, click on Compose and see if there’s a Drive icon in the toolbar.
This is much easier than uploading to somewhere else, like Dropbox, and emailing the link, since you can do everything within Gmail. Still, I’m in favor of Dropbox for cloud storage. Drive is just for attachments and Google Docs.
I’d been dealing with my work-related mail with Mozilla’s Thunderbird for a few weeks. For the personal Gmail account, it was the good old webapp. For a change I hooked the Gmail account with Thunderbird to see how things would go. It had trouble authenticating the Google account, but then remembered about the 2-step verification so created an application-specific password to make it work.
The experience is better than I’d imagined. It’s quite handy being able to open mail in tabs. There are hundreds of add-ons to choose from. Especially, the Conversations add-on is a must. It’s smarter than Gmail’s conversation view. For example, if you get code broken into separate git patches like [PATCH 1/7], [PATCH 2/7] etc, they appear as separate threads in gmail. But this add-on groups all related patches to a single tree of conversation with branches. Clever! Guess I’d be sticking with this for the foreseeable future.
If you haven’t activated 2-step verification for Google / Gmail already, it’s high time you did. 2-step verification essentially requires you to provide two proofs to show that you are actually you. After getting the password correct, you’ll get an SMS with a verification code which you have to enter to sign in. In case the phone is lost, no cellular coverage, etc you can add recovery options.
Why bother? Because you never know when your account’s gonna get compromised, and when you do, you’d wish you were dead.
