Please excu­se my French, but this is too cool to be exlu­si­ve to my esteemed Nor­we­gi­an rea­dership: I’ve been going at this for … well, too long.

As descri­bed and then later discus­sed on blogs.macos.fr, it’s pos­sib­le to mount a gmail file­sys­tem on MacOS X. A mounted gmail file­sys­tem takes advan­ta­ge of the huge capacity of gmail accounts. As adver­ti­sed, a mounted gmail file sys­tem will work as any other disk. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, MacOS X 10.5 «Leo­pard» intro­du­ces chan­ges that break all instruc­tions avai­lab­le on the net. Here’s how I made it work.

First, I did not use gmailfs direct­ly as Jean-Matt­hieu does in his examp­le. Go to gmailfs-app and install GMailFS and Mac­FU­SE. Then,  install MacPyt­hon 2.5.2.

This is the easy part. The dif­fi­cult part invol­ves issu­ing shell com­mands (or using the Ter­mi­nal, as Mac novices say). If you’re not very fami­li­ar with Unix shells, it’s time to learn how now. Come back when you’re an expe­ri­en­ced novice.

First, make your Mac actual­ly use the most recent ver­sion of Pyt­hon: Just point /usr/bin/python to ‘/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin/python’.

Then, install pyOpenS­SL and Cli­ent­Cookie  (yes, down­load Cli­ent­Cookie pro­per. The web page says Cli­ent­Cookie is now part of mecha­nize, but igno­re that).

Then, down­load libg­mail. From the archive, as root copy all the *.py files to ‘/Applications/GMailFS.app/Contents/Resources/Python/’.

Any­way, that’s what I did. I still can’t mount gmail file sys­tems from the com­mand line. The source code is avai­lab­le by svn as ‘svn check­out http://gmailfs-app.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gmailfs-app-read-only’, and my next step is to make the soft­ware have mounted file sys­tems appe­ar in the Fin­der.

But it’s still not usab­le, becau­se copy­ing lar­ge files bre­aks the con­nec­tion. Any hints as to how to sol­ve that are great­ly apprecia­ted.

Thank you. I’ll return to Nor­we­gi­an now.