02-10-2012, 01:23 PM
Hacking Gmail
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Introduction
Welcome to Hacking Gmail. Thanks for buying this book. If you haven’t bought it,
you should. It’s very good, and once you buy it you can stop loitering around the
bookstore stacks. Go on: Buy it, sit down, have a coffee. See? Comfier isn’t it? Ah.
Hacking Gmail. It’s a manly hobby, and this book will tell you how. Sorry? What’s
Gmail, you ask? Well, let me tell you . .
What’s Gmail?
March 31, 2004. A watershed in human history. Google’s web-based e-mail service,
still now at the time of this writing in Beta, and available only to people
invited by other existing users, was launched. Offering a gigabyte of storage, an
incredibly advanced JavaScript interface, and a series of user interface innovations,
Gmail was an instant hit among those who could get access to the system.Today,
more than a year later, Gmail is proving to be one of the flagship applications on
the web—a truly rich application within the browser, combined with the serverbased
power of the world’s leading search engine.
Hacking Gmail?
Of course, all that power just begs to be abused. Power corrupts, as they say,
and hackers are nothing but a corrupt bunch: Almost as soon as Gmail was
launched, hackers were looking at ways to use those capabilities for other purposes.
They investigated the incredibly rich interface, and saw how much of the processing
is done on the user’s own machine; they burrowed into the communication
between the browser and the server; and they developed a series of interfaces for
scripting languages to allow you to control Gmail from your own programs.
Desktop Integration
The first part of this book really highlights its entire theme:
that the Gmail service, although ostensibly a website, can
be dragged over to touch the desktop in ways that make
new and exciting applications possible.
The first five chapters deal with this on a very basic level, allowing
you to use Gmail to its limits before delving into the nitty
gritty of code and some rather extreme uses of the system.
This chapter deals with the situations that arise when you continue
to use Gmail within the browser but want to use it as your
day-to-day e-mail system. There are two areas to cover: new mail
notification and mailto: link redirection.