First, full quote [1]: 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by

First, full quote [1]: 5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services. Second, I imagine both of your examples use some for of API [2], which is clearly "the interface that is provided by Google". On the other hand, if your smartphone were to log into the GMail web-app pretending to be someone using a browser and scrape the HTML, it would, most likely, constitute a violation. 1. http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS 2. http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/ http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/