use WWW::Hotmail;
  
  my $hotmail = WWW::Hotmail->new();
  
  $hotmail->login('foo@hotmail.com', "bar")
   or die $WWW::Hotmail::errstr;
  
  my @msgs = $hotmail->messages();
  die $WWW::Hotmail::errstr if ($!);

  print "You have ".scalar(@msgs)." messages\n";

  for (@msgs) {
        print "messge from ".$_->from."\n";
        # retrieve the message from hotmail
        my $mail = $_->retrieve;
        # deliver it locally
        $mail->accept;
        # forward the message
        $mail->resend('myother@email.address.com');
        # delete it from the inbox
        $_->delete;
  }
  
  $hotmail->compose(
    to      => ['user@email.com','otheruser@otheremail.com'],
    subject => 'Hello Person!',
    body    => q[Dear Person,
  
  I am writing today to tell you about something important.

  Thanks for all your support.
  
  Sincerely,
  Other Person
  ]) or die $WWW::Hotmail::errstr;
[download]

'In the past I have used Net::POP3 for other type scripts but I do not think I can do that with hotmail.'

Yes you can.

Martin

The last time I looked at this, the POP clients that I needed weren't ported to ActiveState Perl yet and were only available on Unix Perl 5.8 and above. There were some other problems in that the more advanced POP clients did a better job of parsing these multi-part fancy e-mail messages. I would be curious if other Monks have gotten fancy e-mail clients to work on ActiveState. It turns out that parsing an e-mail from many clients with potentially many attached files is non-trivial.

In fact, I think you need to go the POP3 (/IMAP) route. From the "Hotmail" (/Windows Live/whatever) Service Agreement:

you may not: ...

use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or "meta-searching");

(emphasis mine above)

In other words, no scraping allowed. Use the legitimate interfaces and you'll be fine. And you can indeed do this with a Perl (the language) script... generally you run those with perl (the interpreter). What is PERL? I have not heard of this contraption... ;)