Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Inside the Gmail Login Sequence (or, has anyone documented all the parameters and JSON response codes)

I generally don't like Wiley books, but near the end of a chapter on how Gmail works actually isn't that bad.

I'm sure there has to be more stuff like

/gmail?
ik=344af70c5d
&view=cv
&search=inbox
&th=101865c04ac2427f
&lvp=-1
&cvp=0
&zx=9m4966e44e98uu

As you can see, this the message ID of the message I clicked on.
But the others are mysterious at the moment. At this point in the
proceedings, alarms went off in my head.Why, I was thinking, is
the variable for message ID th—when that probably stands for thread.
So, I sent a few mails back and forth to create a thread, and loaded
the Inbox and the message back up

elsewhere dissecting the URL parameters, but I haven't found it apart from looking at the libgmail source, the constants file in particular. Has nobody documented this stuff or is google burying any documentation on reverse engineering Gmail?

It is sort of curious that the author is using tcpflow. Fine tool, but using an interceptor proxy like paros or something like firebug is a hell of a lot more efficient than sniffing.

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