GmailFS with MacPorts

Hi everyone!

I've been using MacPorts for quite some time, and I have been very pleased with its simplicity, specially since I am much more used to FreeBSD's amazing ports system. For those who don't know, MacPorts is basically a system of tools that makes it easier for you and everyone to keep a great collection of UNIX software applications up-to-date, without the annoying task of managing all the dependencies or patching some software project (hence the word "port") that was intended to run on Linux or other platform, and that could easily run on a Mac just by changing a line in some file (I'm not exagerating).

These days I've become interested in GMailFS, a software package that allows you to see (technically "mount") a directory in your filesystem (inside your home directory for example) in user space (i.e., outside the kernel space), so you can mount it without any privileges. GMailFS sits on top of FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace), more specifically on top of MacFUSE which in turn was ported by Google, and allows you to see your GMail account as a set of files and directories so you can actually download and upload files to your account with a couple of drag-n-drops with Finder :)

Since I was having problems installing this on my Mac, I've seen many forums with discussions regarding the installation procedures. In the end it all involved a lot of tricks and hacks, and never worked for the latest software versions of the packages that are required to set up GMailFS.

For these reasons I decided to stick with MacPorts (which I believe is a much cleaner and elegant way to manage sofware). Since there was no GMailFS port in MacPorts, not even support for most dependencies, I got in contact with the development team (thanks Raim), and provided feedback enough so a port with all the dependencies for GMailFS was created :)

For those who might be wondering how to get GMailFS working with MacPorts:

• Download a fresh copy of MacPorts from here


• Update your MacPorts tree of ports by opening a terminal and issuing the command sudo port sync


• Install GMailFS by issuing the command sudo port install gmailfs

Please make sure you have python2.5 selected by default, if you don't know or don't have, you can try the following:

• Install python_select by issuing the command sudo port install python_select


• Select python2.5 as the default python interpreter sudo python_select python25

Along the way you will be asked for your password in your Terminal, after you issue a sudo command. This is equivalent to MacOS X's GUI prompt for a password every time you install an application with some installer.

Then you can just create a hidden GMailFS configuration file in your home directory as ~/.gmailfs with a content similar to:

[connection]
# The proxy URL
#proxy = http://user:pass@proxyhost:port
# or just 
#proxy = http://proxyhost:port

# The number or retries for the proxy connection.
#retries = 3

[account]
username = your_username
password = your_password_in_plaintext

[filesystem]
fsname = zOlRRaXPTOzOlRRa

[references]
# reference = filesystem:username:password

[logs]
# Change this to DEBUG for verbose output (useful for debugging)
level = INFO

# if you'd like logs to go to stdout, comment out this variable.
# For logging to, say, stderr, use /dev/stderr of your system's
# equivalent for it
logfile = /dev/stderr

After this, you can mount your GMailFS issuing a command like:

mount -ovolname=gmail,ping_diskarb -t gmailfs /opt/local/share/gmailfs/gmailfs.py path_for_the_directory_where_you_want_to_mount_your_gmailfs

After you have mounted the filesystem, you can copy files from and to it, and you will see your gmail account populated with "weird" emails. That's where the string zOlRRaXPTOzOlRRa I used in the sample configuration file above comes in (by the way, you can change this string to anything else): GMailFS will keep emails in your account with subjects containing the word zOlRRaXPTOzOlRRa. Since such emails in your Inbox can become distracting, you can filter them out by archiving them with a GMail filter like the following:



Please note that I added __g__zOlRRaXPTOzOlRRa__h__ instead of just zOlRRaXPTOzOlRRa, since the real email in your inbox will contain a word with a prefix and suffix, making the word become like this.

Have fun!