One of the most attractive things about Gmail is the amount of storage space that they give to you for free. With that kind of space, you can keep years worth of archived messages in your account. You’re not locked into a certain amount of space, either. If you check out the Gmail Web site, you’ll see that that as the seconds go by, the amount of storage space available to you goes up. Naturally, many people have wanted to use this space for file storage, and several tools have emerged for that purpose. One of the easiest ways that I have found to turn your Gmail account into a personal Web server is XmailHardDrive.com.

This service couldn’t be easier to use. All you do is login with your Gmail address and password, and the site will take you to your file storage area. Upload one or more files (there is currently a 20M limit per file), and XmailHardDrive.com will e-mail the content to your account in an encrypted and compressed format to save space. When you want to retrieve a file, login to the service and grab it. It’s still in beta, but from what I experienced, things are looking good.