Hacking Gmail

88 Part II — Getting Inside Gmail

this quite clearly in the example above. The lines in bold type show the headers

for all three messages, and the whole thing finishes with the entire content of the

requested message.

You then allow the JavaScript code to wrangle the interface afterward. This is a

clever trick: it allows the interface to be very quick at the point the user wants it to

be — when you’re reading through a thread — instead of loading each message

individually.

So, you now know how to retrieve messages. But how do you read them?

Listing 5-14 shows the relevant bit of JavaScript.

Listing 5-14: The Message Itself

D([“mi”,0,3,”10187696869432e6”,0,”0”,”Ben

Hammersley”,”[email protected]”,”me”,”8:59pm (12 minutes

ago)”,[“Ben Hammersley <[email protected]>”]

,[]

,[]

,[]

,”Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:59:40 +0100”,”Re: This is the third

message”,””,[]

,1,,,”Tue Jan 18 2005_11:59AM”]

);

D([“mb”,”And this is another reply back yet again<br>”,1]

);

D([“mb”,”<div><div class=ea><span id=e_10187696869432e6_1>-

Show quoted text -</span></div><span class=e

id=q_10187696869432e6_1><br>On 18 Jan 2005, at 20:59, Ben

Hammersley wrote:<br><br>> And this is a reply

back<br>><br>><br>> On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:05:17

+0100, Ben Hammersley<br>> <<a onclick=\”return

top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”

href=\”mailto:[email protected]\”>[email protected]</a

>> wrote:<br>>> 3rd! THREE!

THIRD!<br>>><br>>><br><br></span></div>”,0]

);

From this you can see that the message is sent in three JavaScript arrays.D([“mi”

contains the header information — its status, the message ID, who sent it, and so

on — and then there are two arrays starting with D([“mb”that contain the first