Hacking Gmail

210 Part III — Conquering Gmail
An Even Simpler Way of Doing It
There is, naturally, an even easier way to do this. Justin Blanton, this tome’s noble
technical editor, points out that if you can’t set server-side filters but can create
multiple mail accounts, you can do the following:
1. Create a new mail account (the username doesn’t matter; no one will see it).
2. Forward the e-mail from your current account to Gmail.
3. Forward your Gmail e-mail to the account you just created.
4. Gmail filters your e-mail before forwarding it along.
5. Use your new mail account (you’ll obviously want to set the “reply-to” and
“from” fields to your current address and not the one you just created).
This is very elegant but does require multiple e-mail accounts.
Using Gmail as Storage for a Photo Gallery
As something as a transition to the final chapter, this use of Gmail is borderline
naughty. Indeed, at the time of this writing, Google has taken the author’s Gmail
account away from him, so fiendish is his wares. Still, he fears nothing here in
Chapter 14 and so will happily point to Goollery, the PHP system for using
Gmail as the storage for an online photo gallery.
Figure 15-6 shows it in action on the demo site. You can download Goollery from
www.wirzm.ch/goollery/.
The authors, Martin Wirz, Andres Villegas, and Matias Daniel Medina, have
done a very nice job with Goollery. It’s easy to use, requiring only PHP, curl, and
ImageMagick to be installed on your server to begin with. (These are all pretty
standard, and your system administrator can help you.)
Once that’s done, you must create a label within your Gmail account called “pictures”
and then follow the rest of the installation instructions included within the
Goollery package.
Goollery uses PHP, and so libgmail, to access Gmail. In the next chapter, you see
precisely how this works.