Unfortunately, it does not resolve my problems - or, more accurately, does not result in a configuration that I want. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I don't want to lose the option of reading my mail remotely; there are times when I'm away from my laptop and have temporary access via someone else's machine, and at those times, reading my mail at that remote host is just what I want to do. However, when I am using my laptop, I'd like for the mail from that remote host to be retrieved automatically - a cron job would do that for me if I had a script that would reliably do a retrieve-and-delete of the kind that I already described, without unintended loss.

I believe that jhourcle has nailed it: 'Expect' should give me pretty much everything I need - perhaps with 'mailx' on the far end to do the actual message/locking/etc. handling. 


-- 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- HG Wells

In reply to Re^2: Battling mail timing issues by oko1
in thread Battling mail timing issues by oko1

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.