What is url for gmail?
Throughout this Insights post, we will discuss significant differences between URLs related to the legacy and new Gmail interfaces (hereafter, the legacy and new Gmail URLs) as well as the process of decoding information from the now “obfuscated” URLs. By doing so, we will be able to effectively extract important information from both the legacy and new Gmail URLs.
We have found that it is still possible, with some additional effort, to extract human-readable and useful information from URLs used by the new Gmail interface. New Gmail URLs related to messages being viewed can be decoded in a way that reveals timestamps as we had before (with the exception of messages sent and received from same account starting in March 2018). Unfortunately, we have not been able to identify composition timestamps in new Gmail URLs as we could in legacy Gmail URLs. We have developed a Python tool (Gmail URL Decoder) which incorporates our research and allows us to extract useful information from both the legacy and new Gmail URLs.
The basic structure of the new Gmail URL format (user number, folders, and search) is the same as it was before, so you are encouraged to revisit the previous Insights post we published on this topic – Digging into Gmail URLs. Most of the fields already explained are still valid and we will focus on those fields that have changed between legacy and new Gmail URLs.
Here we can see the URL of the same message being viewed in both legacy and new interfaces.
It is evident that what has changed is what we previously called the message ID, which we will now refer to as the legacy view token. Remember that with the legacy interface we were able to extract timestamps from the URLs of messages being viewed per the legacy view token. Now let’s explore and compare different legacy view tokens and their corresponding timestamps as well as the new view token that is present in the new URLs for the same messages.
It looks like there is some pattern behind the new view tokens since we have some initial characters that are always the same. We can also see that tokens which are particularly close in time have even more characters in common. Finally, we observe that roughly the second half of each token appears to be completely random, even for those extremely close in time.
Our first intuition leads us to think of this as some direct transformation from the previous legacy view token, that is, the new token also appears to contain some kind of numeric timestamp representation. This is because the abstract structure of both looks to be similar: with numeric timestamps, we have similar first digits (most significant ones) for closer ones and totally different digits for the least significant digits, even for closer ones.
We noticed a problem with this assumption: if you compare the last entry in the table above (from a message received in 2011) to any other one, you will notice that the legacy view token’s most significant digits are not really close to all the other ones (samples from 2018) but we still have strong similarity in the first characters between the new view tokens.
The easiest (and, correct) explanation is that assuming the new view token is some kind of transformation from the legacy view token, there is “something” fixed that gets prepended at the beginning of the numeric timestamp representation before being transformed into the new view token.
That is, instead of simply having:
numeric timestamp (from legacy view token) → transformation → new view token
we would be dealing with:
something + numeric timestamp (from legacy view token) → transformation → new view token
- Open Gmail and write an email. The first step to creating a hyperlink in Gmail is to open Gmail on your device.
- Choose the webpage you want to link.
- Highlight the words you want to hyperlink.
- Press the hyperlink button.
- Copy and paste the link and press OK.
All email messages in your Gmail inbox have a permanent web address and you can add this URL to your bookmarks to quickly access that message in the future. You can save these message links in your task list or your meeting notes as they provide important context to the conversation.
The URL of any email message is Gmail follows a standard format:
The UserId is the sequential ID of the currently-logged Gmail account (default is 0). The Label is the name of the Gmail label that the message is in (or use all). The UniqueId is a unique ID that Gmail assigns to each message.
The key here is the UniqueId that is internally assigned by Gmail.
When you send an email with Google Apps Script, the Gmail API returns a unique ID that you can use to determine the URL of the email message in your sent items.
Here’s a simple procedure to send an email that is base64 encoded.
Now that you have the messageId of the outgoing email message, there are at least three ways to get the URL (permalink) of the email message:
In this approach, we get the associated thread of the email message and then get the URL of the first message in the thread.
This is my favorite approach because it is the most reliable. When you send an email message, a unique message ID is assigned to the email message by the sending service. This message ID is stored in the Message-Id header of the email message and is used by your email client to group messages in the same conversation.
Gmail provides a special rfc822msgid search operator to search emails by message ID and we can use this search operator to get the URL of the email message.
