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Mail management
Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 8:26 pm
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?
Re: Mail management
Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 8:40 pm
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?
Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 8:45 pm
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
Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 9:03 pm
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)...
Posted: Thu Jun 24, 2004 10:22 pm
by PrObLeM
i head gmail will offer pop access
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 2:45 am
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.
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 2:55 am
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

Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 4:40 am
by Grim...
I was just clarifying something magicrobotmonkey said.
I'll edit my post to make it clearer

Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 6:42 am
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
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 10:11 am
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..
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 7:54 pm
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
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 10:22 pm
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.
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 11:56 pm
by feyd
Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 6:57 am
by magicrobotmonkey
nice!
Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 11:13 am
by d3ad1ysp0rk
Feyd, I'm still right however. Google doesn't have pop3, another program WITH google has pop3.
