As I migrate all my mail to my new mail server I am again reminded how poor e-mail is for storing large file attachments. The attachments suck up all the space in your mailbox, slow down IMAP mailboxes (as the message has to be downloaded from the mailserver every time), and thusly just mess things up. It would be much better if each user had a tool to store files on that could be linked to. That way, only a link to the file gets sent around, not the file itself.

Yahoo Briefcase is such a service, but you have to buy the premium service to be able to share your folders. There used to be a number of free sites that offered the same thing, but my experience with them was they were always slow, clunky, and practically unusable. So I have thought about developing my own tool to do this.

But being a good open source citizen, before getting started on a new project, I checked to see if someone had already tackled this problem. And someone has, woo hoo! Check out Boxroom at http://boxroom.rubyforge.org/. This looks to be exactly what I'm looking for. A web based file manager that allows you to share and setup passwords for individual folders. I haven't installed it yet, but I'll post a note once I do.