What I think about

So I'm sitting around thinking "What if someone needed my help to decode Gmail?" What words of wisdom could I pass along to the next developer of a kick ass extension for Gmail.

There is no guide on the subject, at least on the address book part and you think there would be. No Gmail guru seems to be out there who could share bits of wisdom, and I searched the Internet for days and days to find out who may have something to say on the subject.

Finally when all is said and done, the best advice I have is "read the gmail lite code and libgmailer code even if it does not work with the current version of Gmail". It was originally written over a year ago for .php and has not been updated since September 2006 at the time of this post. Both these files helped me decipher what was needed to send "data packets" to Gmail. If you send a data packet to the correct [iframe] you can manipulate Gmail.

I wrote two deconstructing Greasemonkey scripts to help me figure out what is going on under the hood. hijackgmaildatapacks.user.js Lets you enter URL strings you can get from HTTP LIVE HEADERS and watch the Javascript Console for what those data packets return and gmailiframesnoop.user.js lets you know the loading order & when an Iframe has been loaded etc...

I've included them here for your development pleasure. Maybe this is the answer you are looking for.