As an independent publisher or NewsMaster, you may spend a fair amount of your time away from your desk. There may be times when you're out and about that you need access to a computer. If you don't own a WiFi-enabled laptop PC, or simply haven't got it with you when you need it, an internet cafe will provide part of the solution. At least you'll be able to access and send email and surf the net.

However, there may be times when you need to use a document or file that you've saved onto the hard drive of your PC back at base.

If you suspect beforehand that you may need to access certain files 'remotely' at some stage, one option, of course, is to email the files to your own webmail address, as attachments. You can then access your webmail account, open the emails and download or open the files there and then.

The number or size of file(s) you wish to store in this way is of course limited by the amount of space your webmail provider gives you. Another limitation is the size of file you can send at any one time via an email. If you're lucky, you may be allowed a 10MB limit per email attachment. In reality, however, the file size needs to be no more than 7MB, as 3MB will probably be added to the file size resulting from transport encodings. So even though you may have 1GB of storage space on your brand new shiny GMail account, uploading files at a rate of 7MB per email is a daunting task.

Peer2Mail (P2M) is a software tool that let you store and share files on your webmail account.

P2M splits the file you want to share or store, then zips it and finally optionally encrypts it. P2M then sends the file segments one by one to your webmail account. Once P2M has uploaded all the file segments, you can download them and use P2M to merge the segments back to the original file.

If you wish to share your webmail account with friends or colleagues, but don't want to give them the real password, you can encrypt the real password and share that. If a user logged in to either Walla or Gmail with an encrypted password, P2M limits their permissions on the account, thereby preventing them from being able to modify or delete files, change the password or any other settings on the account.

A very useful, free tool that allows you to make good use of all that free web storage space you keep being given and be assured that you have access to all your most important files, whenever and wherever you happen to be.