Hacking Gmail

Addressing
Addresses
chapter
Gmail’s mastery of your e-mail wouldn’t be of much use
without an address book. Lucky for us, Gmail provides a
perfectly functional one. Indeed, it was the address autocompletion,
where you can start typing a known address and have
it appear automatically within the To: field of a new mail, that
first excited the Gmail beta testers. As an example of Ajax programming,
it was, at the time, second to none.
The auto-completion system gets its addresses from, and is centered
on, the Gmail Contacts list. In this chapter, you learn how
to control the Contacts list from your own programs.
The Contacts List
The Contacts list is accessed from the link on the left of your
Gmail screen. It looks, if you’re logged into my system at least,
very much like Figure 12-1.
As far as an address book goes, it’s pretty simple. But combined
with the auto-complete function, it provides a very useful way of
dealing with your (or at least my) failing memory when it comes
to e-mail addresses.
Adding and managing contacts from your browser is obvious and
far below your geeky level, so let’s go straight to the scripting.
in this chapter
˛ Importing contacts
˛ Displaying contacts
˛ Exporting contacts