Well, the email is copyrighted, but neither Yahoo, nor the receiver of the email has the copyright - that right belongs to the sender. So, you can't use copyright as an argument to bypass Yahoo's or Hotmails interface.

I'm not sure whether perlmonks is the appropriate place to seek legal advice. This is a Perl site, mostly populated by people who only know how they would like the law to be, and not by people with a legal training. If you try to do something of which you suspect you might break a law, consult a lawyer. His/her professional advice is far more useful than anything you find here.

Having said that, IMO, 'screen scraping' falls in the same category as 'framing someone elses pages'. And I know lawsuits where people who framed other peoples pages lost.

What I don't understand is why someone who's technically capable to screen scrape uses yahoo and hotmail addresses.

Abigail