Two interesting things in Gmail

Gmail is the best web application I have ever seen. Embedded Ajax chat, fast mail retrieval, live updating, and along with that I observed these strange things.

* observe carefully at the link of Gmail inbox item to identify the param link for “download file”
* Gmail is allowing to download the file from the inbox, even after the logout

At the time of login it checks the browser agent, does a round trip (this is to calculate the connection speed), and the system resources. After this it produces some variables (”altid and real id”). Every inbox item has param link but the download link alone varies from login to login.  All the download links are the param links for that uploaded file, and all those links are applicable for that file any time on any machine….
For Ex:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=2c97e2c7a5&realattid=f_flhzuwaj0&attid=0.1&

disp=attd&view=att&th=123423330f
In the above link ik, realattid and th are variables for the download load link, the ik and realattid  keep on changing from one login time(session) to another. The last attribute is th which means thread number for inbox item. So in this link ik and realattid are present only for namesake and they are not useful to locate the download item. The number of download items is indicated by attid.  Attid=0.2 means that mail item has two number of download items

Based on this information, in my next blog, I will try to give the information about how we can use the Gmail account for normal file hosting. Google provided You tube for video content and Picasa for images, but they didn’t provide any place for normal files like rar, zip,tz,etc…. So we have to make another Google product for that.

so even after the logout from the Gmail, the session is live for the download files. The Session expires only after we exit the browser. So if we use the Gmail at offices or Internet cafe we shouldn’t forget to close the browser before you leave the system.

When I was surfing to know about Gmail Architecture, I found an interesting article. There it is explained clearly on how the Gmail works from login to logout.

If any body wants to know the internal architecture and work flow, I suggest these sites

about Gmail architecture

Gmail Client side architechture