Hacking Gmail

110 Part II — Getting Inside Gmail

Listing 6-3(continued)

Copyright (C) 2005 Mark Pilgrim

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or

modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License

as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2

of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be

useful,

but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

GNU General Public License for more details.

You can download a copy of the GNU General Public License at

http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/COPYING

or get a free printed copy by writing to the Free Software

Foundation,

Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301,

USA.

END LICENSE BLOCK */

location.href = location.href.replace(/^http:/, ‘https:’);

//

// ChangeLog

// 2005-07-08 - 0.3 - MAP - added license block

// 2005-06-28 - 0.2 - MAP - changed GMail URL

//

This idea, rewriting URLs, can be very powerfully used. With Mark Pilgrim’s

technique of using location.href.replace, you can do this by brute force.

With the next example, “Mailto Compose in Gmail,” you will see the more radical

version of this.

MailtoComposeInGmail

Perhaps the biggest issue that hits Gmail users, if they start to use the application

as their primary e-mail tool, is that mailto:links found within e-mails do not

trigger Gmail, but rather cause your operating system to load up what it thinks is

the default e-mail application. One moment of thoughtless clicking, and Outlook

Express starts appearing all over the screen. Nausea and discomfort result.