Webmail access using shell scripting Post: 302243608

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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Webmail access using shell scripting Post 302243608 by era on Monday 6th of October 2008 07:00:53 AM

10-06-2008

Registered User

The question is too broad to give any particular advice, but here's a broad overview.

The simple, naive approach is to use "screen scraping". Create a script which uses a text-mode browser such as lynx or w3m and logs in and downloads the web page. Post-process the web page to a suitable format. There are Perl and PHP modules for making this almost palatable. There used to be a script called "gotmail" which downloaded mail from Hotmail using this approach.

If the webmail service offers POP or IMAP access, that is probably preferrable. Again, there are Perl and PHP and Python modules if you want to write your own simple client. Or have a look at fetchmail if all you need is the ability to download mail.

Web 2.0 webmail providers might offer their own simple Ajax API for manipulating their service. I haven't seen any but that would be a very zeitgeist thing to do for them. (I don't use Gmail but imagine they might have something like this. But then they have IMAP which in many ways might be preferable unless you specifically want to play with their calendar integration or something.)

era

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platform::shell

platform::shell(n)					       Tcl Bundled Packages						platform::shell(n)

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NAME

       platform::shell - System identification support code and utilities

SYNOPSIS

       package require platform::shell ?1.1.4?

       platform::shell::generic shell
       platform::shell::identify shell
       platform::shell::platform shell
_________________________________________________________________

DESCRIPTION

       The platform::shell package provides several utility commands useful for the identification of the architecture of a specific Tcl shell.

       This  package  allows the identification of the architecture of a specific Tcl shell different from the shell running the package. The only
       requirement is that the other shell (identified by its path), is actually executable on the current machine.

       While for most platform this means that the architecture of the interrogated shell is identical to the architecture of  the  running  shell
       this  is  not generally true. A counter example are all platforms which have 32 and 64 bit variants and where a 64bit system is able to run
       32bit code. For these running and interrogated shell may have different 32/64 bit settings and thus different identifiers.

       For applications like a code repository it is important to identify the architecture of the shell which will  actually  run  the  installed
       packages, versus the architecture of the shell running the repository software.

COMMANDS

       platform::shell::identify shell
	      This command does the same identification as platform::identify, for the specified Tcl shell, in contrast to the running shell.

       platform::shell::generic shell
	      This command does the same identification as platform::generic, for the specified Tcl shell, in contrast to the running shell.

       platform::shell::platform shell
	      This command returns the contents of tcl_platform(platform) for the specified Tcl shell.

KEYWORDS

       operating system, cpu architecture, platform, architecture

platform::shell 						       1.1.4							platform::shell(n)