Webmail access using shell scripting

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi all,
Is it possible that I can access a webmail inbox using unix shell scripting? If that is possible, can you please give me some tips so that i can proceed further?

Thanks,
Geetha

2

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.)

3

Thanks era... But I am not clear with your idea... Can you please let me know in specific, that can I use shell scripting in particular?

4

Anything is possible, but anything beyond the simplest screen scraping (fetching a series of linked pages, preserving login credentials, cookies, etc) in shell is going to be rather painful. The shell is good at passing simple textual data between different tools, but this basically calls for a tool which preserves internal state, so a scripting language with networking support etc would probably be more appropriate for anything a little bit more sophisticated.

It would help if you could provide some details. Do you simply want to fetch a list of the top Subject lines in the inbox, or actually do some real manipulation of those messages?

5

Thanks era. I need to fetch all the mails from a particular email id and also need to fetch some contents from those mails. Finally, need to place those contents in a csv file and mail it again to few mail ids.
Thanks,
geetha

6

If it's Hotmail, look into gotmail. If you have POP or IMAP access, try fetchmail.

7

Thanks era... Let me try with things and come 2 u wth the results...
Thanks again