Yahoo_Hotmail login (again)

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have been trying to figure out a way to log into yahoo/hotmail mail accounts. I have been searching in newsgroups, on this site and on "script-sites" for some info on how to accomplish this. I've seen someone mentioning using HTTP::Cookies, but I can't understand how this is supposed to work on sites like hotmail and yahoo, where we can't get a login url, like

http://username:pw@somesite.com

If we don't have such a login url, how are we going to store the cookie which is received in the login process?

Is the only way to accomplish this task to dissect the login form and try to generate similar input as these sites' login-script generates? Doesn't seem easy with this MD5-javascript stuff...?

Does anyone know how to do this?

Regards,
geekwannabe

Comment on Yahoo_Hotmail login (again)

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•Re: Yahoo_Hotmail login (again) by merlyn (Sage) on Jul 30, 2002 at 23:42 UTC
It's probably easiest to just stare at how Mail::Webmail::Yahoo does it. And you could just install that, unless you really want to write it from scratch. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Re: Yahoo_Hotmail login (again) by Nightblade (Beadle) on Jul 30, 2002 at 23:44 UTC
I dont know how to solve your problem, but here is already maked scripts to get mail from Yahoo/Hotmail: Gotmail is a utility to non-interactively download email from a Hotmail account. It can download messages from all folders, messages from certain folders, or new messages only. There are options to delete downloaded messages or mark them as read. Gotmail can forward messages to other email addresses or save them as local mbox-style mailboxes. http://freshmeat.net/projects/gotmail/ FetchYahoo is a Perl script that downloads mail from a Yahoo! webmail account to a local mail spool, an mbox file, or to procmail. It is meant to replace fetchmail for people using Yahoo! mail since Yahoo!'s POP and email forwarding services are no longer free. It includes all parts and attachments within the email. It can also forward the email to a specified address. http://freshmeat.net/projects/fetchyahoo/	[reply]