Hacking Gmail

Getting Inside Gmail

S

o, by now you should be up to speed with actually using

Gmail. It’s time to get a bit dirtier. Time to get under the

hood, so to speak, and fiddle with the application. In this

part, you look at how Gmail works and how to make it work

for you.

First, you look at skinning Gmail in Chapter 4. Making Gmail

look different might seem to be a strange thing to do, but it’s

both fun and educational. The knowledge you pick up there, and

in Chapter 5 where you investigate the JavaScript-ybased work-

ings of the application, will enable you to fully understand how

Gmail works. In Chapter 6, you learn how Greasemonkey and

Firefox can be used to radically improve your Gmail experience

and to build your own Greasemonkey scripts.

In Chapter 7, you encounter the various programming language

libraries available for use with Gmail, and you start to use them:

writing scripts to check for and read mail (Chapters 8 and 9), and

to send replies (Chapter 10). By the end of that chapter, you’ll be

writing little mini applications that use Gmail as their remote

processing system. Exciting? Oh yes!

Chapter 4

Skinning Gmail

Chapter 5

How Gmail Works

Chapter 6

Gmail and Greasemonkey

Chapter 7

Gmail Libraries

Chapter 8

Checking for Mail

Chapter 9

Reading Mail

Chapter 10

Sending Mail

in this part

part

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