Of course you use Gmail. But for email, right? Did you know that you can use Gmail for a lot many other things too?
1. Use Gmail As A Free Online File Format Converter
If you want to convert any office document to HTML format, think of nothing other than Gmail.
You don’t have to install third-party application like PDF2HTML or Adobe Acrobat for this. You can convert doc, xls, ppt, rtf, pdf files and the new Microsoft Office 2007 formats like docx, xlsx and pptx to HTML, absolutely free by using Gmail.
Just attach the document to a mail and send it to yourself. When you receive the mail open it and click “View as HTML”.
2. Use Gmail As An MP3 Player
If you want to try out a new audio player, try Gmail!
Send an mp3 file to yourself and see that Gmail contains an option to play it. Clicking it will open a flash MP3 player using which you can play the song without downloading it.
3. Use Gmail As Your OpenID
You can use your Google account username and password to login at a number of sites like Zoho and Plaxo. But what about the sites that accepts only a URL as an OpenID field?
Welcome to openid-provider.appspot.com. This site, built on Google App Engine, allows you to create a OpenID URL from your Google Account Credentials. Login with your Gmail username and password and the site will provide you a URL like http://openid-provider.appspot.com/, which you can use on regular OpenID accepting sites.
4. Use Gmail As Your Online Storage
Gmail provides a virtually unlimited online space that normal users find impossible to fill up with emails alone. So why not use the remaining space as your personal online file storage area?
GMail Drive is a shell extension for Windows that adds the Gmail storage as a disk in My Computer. All operations that you normally do with a regular hard drive – copy, paste, drag and drop, works for Gmail drive too. Just that the data is not residing in your computer but high up in Google clouds.
Linux users can try out GmailFS which provides similar functionality as GMail Drive in windows. Using this tool, you can mount your Gmail storage space as a file system and transfer files between them just like any other disks.
5. Use Gmail To Play Snakey
If all that emails are making you bored, try the game that comes packed with Gmail.
Gmail labs contains a game – Old Snakey, that you first need to enable from the settings pane in order to play. Go to Gmail settings –> Labs and set the Old Snakey radio button to enabled. Now, return back to inbox and hit the ‘&’ key to start the game.
Bonus Tip: Convert A List of URLs Into Clickable Links
Have a list of URLs in plain text (like this one) that you would like to convert into HTML clickable links?
Just email that list to your Gmail id. Open the email and you can see that Gmail has converted all the URLs to links. Copy that HTML and paste anywhere, like into an excel sheet.
Do you know of any other interesting uses for Gmail? Tell us in the comments.
The final version of the most popular Linux distro, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is almost ready to be released which is on October 30. It is going to bring a number of new features, changes and bug fixes.
It also enables Internet sharing and allows you to define both inbound and outbound access policy with the option to whitelist or blacklist traffic. You can easily watch the active internet connections including the traffic routed through the firewall.
