3 useful gmail tricks I did not know/use before

I am a big fan of gmail and most of the people I know use gmail as their primary web email. I have been  regularly monitoring my gmail storage usage given by google and wondering, can I use the allocated storage for storing and sharing big documents and photos. On our Saturday family visit to local library, I grabbed the famous book Google Hacks and started reading over the weekend. I found 2 useful tricks and tips from the book that I would like to share with you and also add one more that I grabbed from the gmail help page while researching some of the gmail capabilities.

1. Using gmail filesystem as Hard drive in your windows "My Computer" -  Individual gmail user get seven and half gigabyte of email storage which is pretty huge. So far, after many years of usage, I have barely used 9% of the storage. Gmail drive is a shell namespace extension program which maps the gmailFS to your windows drive. Its a cool legitimate software utility, which has not been blocked by google, so no immediate danger in using it. Here is what you do to add GmailDrive to add to your My Computer:
• Download gmailfs116.zip from one of the download links given on GmailDrive webpage. 
• Unzip it -> Run setup, it will add GmailDrive in your My Computer
• Login with your gmail id and passwd and there you go. You will see empty drive. Create folders, drag and drop your files from your computer and see them immediately appearing in your gmail with subject prefixed with GMAILFS. Have fun and explore your own innovative usage of GmailDrive.
2. Create multiple email addresses our of your single gmail  -  Plus addressing is a feature supported by gmail using which you can create multiple addresses and still  emails sent to those addresses to your primary gmail. Here is how you use it:
• Use plus (+) sign to add a tag to your email name before @. For example, if your gmail is johndoe, you can create one like johndoe+ebay@gmail.com. In fact you can be more descriptive and create one for your ebay seller account johndoe+ebay+seller@gmail.com and one for your ebay buyer account johndoe+ebay+buyer@gmail.com. All these emails are going to come to your regular johndoe@gmail.com address.
• So whats the use? well, the real use is in auto filtering of incoming emails. Lets say, you had to provide your email to sign up for a xyz mailing lists but you don't want the regular emials coming and annoying you everyday. Well, you can use johndoe+xyzmailing@gmail.com and you can easily set an auto filter on xyzmailing to send them to trash. Try it and discover usage, let us know..
3. Add a custom From email address and send mail from gmail server - This is pretty cool, I correspond with few people using my hotmail, but don't want to get the overhead of using multiple email clients. You can setup other emails as From email addresses in your gmail, see this post from gmail.

Hope you had a great weekend !