Can I redirect a webmail-only email account?

September 16, 2005 8:31 AM

Is it possible to screen scrape or somehow redirect a webmail-only account? For stupid reasons our school has restricted email this way and I'd really like to reduce the amount of email accounts I have to keep track of.

I guess some clueless student was shunting all of their forwarded school email to their spam folder. So now we can only access it via webmail. No POP or telnet. Is there some way of grabbing the mail that I can do transparently? I run Tiger on my laptop, if it matters. I prefer Safari, but I do have Firefox as well.

posted by O9scar to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Screen scraping is not such a good idea for this sort of thing. I would go down and talk to the guys in Information Services (or whatever they are on your campus), and ask them to put in a .forward file for your account, after you show them that you Know What You Are Doing. If you really have exhausted this possibility come back and maybe we'll hack something together :-D.
posted by onalark at 8:37 AM on September 16, 2005

onalark seems to have a suggestion worth checking into. But if your IS department won't help you out and you're stuck having to screen scrape, this seems like a good job for WWW::Mechanize for Perl.
posted by ducksauce at 9:00 AM on September 16, 2005

Or mechanize for Python.
posted by grouse at 9:14 AM on September 16, 2005

Wow, ducksauce, that's a great find.
posted by onalark at 9:15 AM on September 16, 2005

Will this help?
posted by gramcracker at 11:20 AM on September 16, 2005

These are both excellent suggestions. I will try sweet-talking the IT department first -- if not one of these two solutions should work.
posted by O9scar at 11:39 AM on September 16, 2005

Also, FreePOPs might do what you're asking.
posted by sjvilla79 at 8:17 PM on September 16, 2005