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Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

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31–40 of 63 posts

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#31

Did you know there is a remote API for Gmail which is compatible with Exchange, Outlook.com, yahoo mail and every other mail provider out there? It's called IMAP/SMTP!

This API is for interacting with Gmail's user interface more so than for interacting with its back-end data.

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#33

Did you know there is a remote API for Gmail which is compatible with Exchange, Outlook.com, yahoo mail and every other mail provider out there? It's called IMAP/SMTP!

SMTP? Never heard of it. This library is more for developing chrome extensions that take advantage of gmail's DOM and UI state

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#34

Did you know there is a remote API for Gmail which is compatible with Exchange, Outlook.com, yahoo mail and every other mail provider out there? It's called IMAP/SMTP!

AFAIK Gmail's implementation of IMAP is kind of borked and stuff like the "smart" categorization (e.g. social networks, notifications, etc) doesn't reflect into imap folders (or RSS their RSS feeds, for that matter). Labels do, though, with a workaround.

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#35

Author of Gmailr here, which apparently inspired this project. Kudos! Glad to see someone taking the ball and running with it. I haven't had time to update Gmailr lately, as it is something that needs active maintenance. The main challenge here is that Gmail will have continue to have bursts of updates that break extension libraries, with relatively long periods of stability.

Thanks James! Your library was the inspiration for the observer methods. I agree with the maintenance part but I think having this out there will help reduce duplicating efforts.

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#36
Thanks for making the library, glad to see you put lots of time into the docs too. Hopefully the can of worms you've opened doesn't drive you crazy, personally I would've stopped the second I found myself writing something like this...

$($($($('.nH .if').children()[1]).children()).children()[1]).children()[1]

:)

[1]https://github.com/KartikTalwar/gmail.js/blob/master/src/gma...

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#37
post #15

It would be amazing if this were a service. Easier said than done, I know -- but, basically this but have it check a JSON file every few hours and gets the updated selectors. (For people who don't know, all GMail's classes and IDs are things like '.xb3', and they change often.) Having worked on Mozilla Add-ons for a long time, one of the biggest problems was by the time any G-Mail add-on was approved, it was already…

Not sure Google would like this?

Google is aware that people are building tools on top of their UI. If they were against it, they could pretty easily thwart it (e.g. by randomizing their HTML/CSS, or by serve different versions to different users). The fact that they haven't taken time to do this is, I believe, evidence that they aren't hostile to these efforts.

Also, I've personally been in contact with people on the Gmail team about this kind of stuff. They are, generally, supportive, but they're very clear that they'll make no guarantees about stability.

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#38
post #18

Unfortunately this type of hacking isn't really sustainable. Even small tweaks to the Gmail UI often change the DOM in very unpredictable ways. When they released the new compose feature, pretty much every single Gmail Chrome extension broke. We haven't really announced it yet, but I've been working on a new email platform with some friends to solve a lot of these issues. It's essentially Rails/Meteor for email featu…

> I've been working on a new email platform

This! You're doing it right. I wish all the Gmail tweakers united to build a better platform rather than spend their time propping the old, PRISM-tainted, UI-crippled service.

Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail

#40

These projects are already pretty advanced versions of this: https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr and https://github.com/joscha/gmailui In fact gmailr is used in "Cloudy" - one of the more advanced gmail plugins.

Hey catmanjan, see jamesjyu's comment :-)
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