Hacking Gmail

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Contents
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How GmailFS Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
What Makes Up a File? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
Representing All of This in E-Mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
The Actual Data in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
And Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Appendix: Long Code Listings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
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Acknowledgments
Books of this nature are tremendously difficult to write. Without support from
Google (we didn’t ask, admittedly) and with Gmail being in perpetual Beta
throughout the writing process, we often found ourselves with chapters being
made obsolete overnight. Deadlines passed, were rescheduled, passed again.
Editors wept salt tears. Publishers, that sainted breed, were patient and handsome
and generally lovely. Chris Webb and Brian Herrmann, both of the Wiley clan,
stood by the project so faithfully that their names will be forever legend. Men of
the Far North will sing songs to their honor. Justin Blanton, the technical editor,
managed to combine a Law Degree with the task: there’s not enough beer in the
world to pay him back. Thanks to all of them, and everyone else at Wiley.
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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 ser-
vice, 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 server-
based 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 process-
ing 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.
This book shows what they did, how to do it yourself, and what to do after you’ve
mastered the techniques. Meanwhile, you’ll also learn all about Ajax, the terribly
fashionable JavaScript technique that Gmail brought into the mainstream. Two
topics for the price of one!