Mail management

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magicrobotmonkey
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Mail management

Post by magicrobotmonkey »

My hotmail account just started being full all the time so I got a yahoo account. As soon as I got done switching all my major email needs to that I got a gmail invite. So now I'm looking at 3 email accounts (not counting several accounts with clietnts. Its not easy keeping track of all this.

I want to develop a mail managemen system which will allow me to connect to numerous html based email accounts and at the least check for new accounts and maybe ultimately develop it into a full fledged email system with all kinds of goodies.

My first question is: does anything like this exist?

MY second question: Is it possible (maybe with cURL) to connect to various email services (hotmail, yahoo, etc.) and retrieve that sort of thing?

any input?
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Weirdan
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Re: Mail management

Post by Weirdan »

magicrobotmonkey wrote: MY second question: Is it possible (maybe with cURL) to connect to various email services (hotmail, yahoo, etc.) and retrieve that sort of thing?
It's perfectly possible but I wouldn't call it simple when it comes to 'full-fledged, with all kinds of goodies' and so on... Keep in mind that you would have to deal with html pages intended for live pesons, not for applications ;) It's easy to implement as a quick hack though.

doesn't hotmail offer a pop3 access?
magicrobotmonkey
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Post by magicrobotmonkey »

no, hotmail lets you use outlook express to access through html. both hotmail and yahoo will check pop3 accounts for you but they dont give you one.

I realize it would be alot of work - that's why I'll start off just with one page that will show any new emails or something of the sort..?
It's easy to implement as a quick hack though.
What are you thinking? cURL into it or what> I dont really know cURL so I guess I'd better get learning
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Weirdan
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Post by Weirdan »

curl and preg_* is my best tools when I need to write something like this.

Just checked hotmail.com (never been there before), they have pretty complicated login sequence involving several third-party hosts such as loginnet.passport.com, passport.net etc. Nevertheless I'm pretty sure this sequence could be traced and all required cookies could be gathered (there's a lot of them)...
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PrObLeM
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Post by PrObLeM »

i head gmail will offer pop access
Grim...
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Post by Grim... »

magicrobotmonkey wrote:both hotmail and yahoo will check pop3 accounts for you but they dont give you one.
Yahoo.co.uk offers pop3 access, plus 100mb of storage, all for free.
Last edited by Grim... on Fri Jun 25, 2004 4:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Weirdan
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Post by Weirdan »

Grim... wrote:Yahoo.co.uk offers pop3 access, plus 100mb of storage, all for free.
There are a lot of freemail hosts offering pop3, we were talking about what to do if the host in question doesn't :)
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Post by Grim... »

I was just clarifying something magicrobotmonkey said.
I'll edit my post to make it clearer :)
magicrobotmonkey
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Post by magicrobotmonkey »

hmmm.. evidently yahoo hates the US - its $19.99/year for pop access. Thinking about hotmail, is there an HTML mail standard or anything? In outlook express when setting up an account, you can choose HTML for type and put in your host. They obviously have hotmail in there already as its all M$ but maybe I could figure out that html thing and do it that way instead of messing with the complicated login
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

well, when you use the http mail system in outlook the email views are html pages, so you might be able to view the source somehow. It's been a while since I've used hotmail on a regular basis. There's a Gmail POP interface available too.. so it's definitely possible..
Nay
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Post by Nay »

feyd wrote:There's a Gmail POP interface available too
hey feyd, can you go a little more into detail on that? i have gmail but can't really figure out using cURL since it's javascript based. anyhow, i though google didn't have POP atm?

-Nay
d3ad1ysp0rk
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Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

Nay wrote:
feyd wrote:There's a Gmail POP interface available too
hey feyd, can you go a little more into detail on that? i have gmail but can't really figure out using cURL since it's javascript based. anyhow, i though google didn't have POP atm?

-Nay
They don't.
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

magicrobotmonkey
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Post by magicrobotmonkey »

nice!
d3ad1ysp0rk
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Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

Feyd, I'm still right however. Google doesn't have pop3, another program WITH google has pop3. :P
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