Google released its official gmail notifier.
http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/

Hmmm... I had been planning on calling the user-targeted utility based on libgmail ([ http://libgmail.sf.net]) "GmailHelper", guess I need to look for a new name. (Although they don't actually refer to the Notifier as gmail-helper except in the URL.)

--Phil.

(Yeah, I know no-one else cares, I was just thinking aloud... :-))

They definitely call it Gmail Notifier... looks like they stole your name for their URL though :)

I've got a screenshot here:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/insidegoogle/6862.html
If anybody wants to see what it looks like in action.

Nice. I don't know why but I tried to make a screenshot several times, and the little email-alert-window was never showing in the image, even though it was definitely open at the time! The rest was showing fine.

I posted the Gmail notifier news to Slashdot and there's a lot of discussion on it going:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/1251258&tid=217&tid=95&tid=1

(If you look closely there are also some Gmail invites getting handed out...)

[ HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftware GoogleAutoupdate-G001]

AvailableURL
http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/data/1.0.21.0/gnotify.cab

UpdateURL
http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/verscheck/

The last URL returns "Google!!!" (maybe checks user agent?)

The installer seems to store the account details because they aren't re-requested if the utility is re-installed.

(Ignore previous comment about account details, I think it's incorrect...)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GNotify 1.0.21.0)

Initially two secure requests are made (I assume to log in), then:

GET /gmail?ui=pb&q=label%3A%5Ei%20label%3A%5Eu HTTP/1.1

(Query is 'label:^i label:^u' ('inbox' & 'unread'))

The response to the GET request appears to be binary and includes sender details, subject lines and a message snippet. It also includes unknown binary data.

Splitting the returned data on the 0x01 bytes makes it look similar to the "data packs" returned in the usual Gmail HTML interface.

The data packs seem to be of variable length, with the end of the data pack indicated by a empty string.

The last two items in the standard data packs are the subject & body snippet.

For strings such as subject and body the first byte seems to be the length of the string (excluding trailing byte), the last byte is unknown, but seems to be an indicator of the string represents. (e.g. 0xAA = subject, 0xB8 = body snippet)

The final data pack is of a different format and has a number of padding 0x00 bytes.

I've got an extremely rough Python script reading most of the reponse, it's not quite as easy as splitting on the 0x01 bytes, but I've handled most things except what I think are date related values.

Incidentally, the query seems to be able to be modified to be any Gmail query.

I'll probably put something into `libgmail` http://libgmail.sf.net/ to handle this, since it has a few benefits over the current method.

--Phil.

i am using an extension to firefox "Gmail notifier" and its great

I've managed to read the data pack (you can optain it with normal login)
does anybody know what are the first two secure request?

I assume the first two secure requests are just the usual login process.

I've just commited the rough script (demos/test_notifier.py) I referred to above, it parses the response intended to be used by the official Gmail Notifier.

Either check out all of libgmail from CVS or try this link in a day or so:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/libgmail/libgmail/demos/test_notifier.py?content-type=text%2Fplain

--Phil.

is another login process from what I've managed to find out...

Well, even if it is a different process, the standard login method works as well.

--Phil.

Google is taking forever to release a version of Gmail Notifier that uses Https, so I made my own. You can find the instructions here: http://fairlyrealistic.com/archives/2004/12/gmail_notifier.php

Enjoy :-)