Downloading email from (Lycos) webmail?

June 15, 2004 10:07 PM

Is email in old now unused free web accounts such as Lycos etc.. lost or is there a way to suck it off the server without paying for a upgrade to POP capabiliites?
posted by mary8nne to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

This is for Gmail, and there's a thread about it here. But if you've got an account already with another provider, you'll need to find a scraper for it. Here's a yahoo! scraper in prototype. For hotmail, there's hotmail popper. For more info, try googling "screenscraping", which is the technique that these use. It means to take the recieved html as though your program is a browser, and parse out the wanted data.
posted by condour75 at 10:20 PM on June 15, 2004

Hotmail Popper seems to be Windows-only. This MacPerson is (for now, at least) tediously forwarding individual messages to Gmail manually. Better solutions eagerly awaited.
posted by Alylex at 11:48 PM on June 15, 2004

With the WWW::Automate module, it's pretty easy (couple of hours work, max) to write one in Perl. A friend with intermediate Perl skills would probably do it for you for a tray of fudge brownies -- or if you know Perl, you could do it yourself. There are modules at CPAN already for Yahoo (Mail::Client::Yahoo) and Hotmail (WWW::Hotmail). I don't see one for Lycos yet, but if you or your friend felt generous, you could write one and submit it yourself.
posted by quarantine at 12:27 AM on June 16, 2004

It's a shame, too, because aren't most web mail services just POP applications, anyway? Maybe the "POP upgrade" is as simple as getting them to stop blocking incoming requests from other clients. A phone call or two might get you somewhere if you can just get a core nerd on the line.
posted by scarabic at 12:48 AM on June 16, 2004