Chances are you know what Gmail is and have been using it for quite some time, even if Google’s service is technically still in beta. But did you know that Gmail can be used for many other practical functions other than sending and receiving e-mail? With the appropriate extensions and setting hacks, you can make Gmail do things that other web-based e-mail services and even some desktop clients cannot. In this guide, we will show you how to implement the ten hidden features you need to know about Gmail and introduce you to five of our favorite Gmail Labs add-ons. You may already know or use some of these features, but there are sure to be a few in here that you do not.

Use Gmail as a Hard Drive

Gmail Drive is a simple shell extension that creates a virtual file system using your Gmail account storage. Since Gmail’s storage has steadily increased, this gives you a very good size flash drive. Right now Gmail offers around 7GB of free storage.

Download Gmail Drive from this link. Save the file to your Desktop. Unzip the download and doubleclick on the Setup file to begin the installation.

If you get a window that says navigation to the website was canceled, ignore it. The program was set up correctly as long as it the drive appears under My Computer.

Double-click on the Gmail Drive system folder. It will prompt you to login, so enter your username and password for your Gmail account. We also suggest that you click the box next to Auto-Login so you do not have to repeat this process in the future.

After Gmail Drive logs into Gmail, you can start dragging and dropping files on to this virtual drive. Gmail will upload the files to your inbox, so make sure you are connected to the Internet.

When you login to your Gmail account, you will notice the uploaded files look similar to regular e-mails .

If you want, you can create a filter so these attachments go to a designated place, but more on filters later.

Download all Gmail attachments

If you have a lot of e-mail, chances are you have several attachments you need. You could go through all the e-mail and manually download all the attachments, but that would take forever. For this, we will need Mozilla Thunderbird and need to set up Gmail’s IMAP feature. After that, we will use Attachment Extractor and retrieve the attachments. The reason we are using Mozilla Thunderbird is because it’s free and has the capability to use add-ons.

First, we need to setup Gmail’s IMAP. Login to Gmail, click on the Settings button and then click on the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. Under IMAP access enable IMAP and then save the changes. Since we don’t need to have Gmail open while completing the next couple of steps, you can close Gmail.

Download Mozilla Thunderbird if you don’t have it already. You can find it here.

Double-click the file and begin installing Thunderbird using the simple installation wizard.

When you first open the program, you will get a new account setup wizard. Make sure “E-mail account” is selected and then click Next. In the “Your Name” box, enter your name, or whatever name you want to appear on your sent e-mails. In the “E-mail Address” field, enter your Gmail address in the format username@gmail.com.

In the “Incoming Server” field, type: imap.gmail.com

In the “Outgoing Server” field, type: smtp.gmail.com

In the Incoming and Outgoing username fields on the next screen, enter your complete Gmail address

On the next screen, you can name the Account whatever you wish, the name doesn’t affect how the attachments are downloaded.

After you finish the setup wizard, click on Tools and select Account Settings. Under Server Settings, change the port to 993 and set the Security Settings to SSL. These are the default settings Gmail uses and must be set up properly in order to receive email.