The Spout

Very early versions of my Gmail Notifier simplified the Gmail login operation by launching the default web browser directly into the Gmail account. Since the software could use the stored password and user name to do that, it was very easy to duplicate the same process that Google did to login. But then one day, Google decided to put an end to this back door and to protect users from using all kind of third party applications that promise to login to the Gmail account. Problem was that some applications actually formed a URL that could really login, but they forgot that browsers cache URLs and keep them in history. So to create a protection that will prevent that from happening, Google added a random factor to each login session. This actually can be referred to as authentication. Now when the entire login process is authenticated, it is impossible to login from an external application like Gmail Notifier.