automatic login

July 20, 2005 4:33 PM

IEFilter: Is there a way to automatically launch and login to a specific website on IE when the computer starts? Assume you are not allowed to save the password within IE.
posted by pencroft to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

perl, WWW:Mechanize and HTML::TokeParse

Pretty simple given you know perl or another modern scripting language (python, ruby..)
posted by seinfeld at 4:36 PM on July 20, 2005

The way I'd approach it is have IE's startup page be a local html file, which is produced by URL2File , which is launched from a batch file, which is launched from the Startup group. It's possible that by the time the shell launches retrieval of the html file, IE will be booting and the local html file will be waiting. This is not possible without some MS-DOS and batch file knowledge, though, and it won't capture images or complicated pages.
posted by rolypolyman at 4:45 PM on July 20, 2005

You could also do it by using a macro program and having a specific saved set of keystrokes be launched via the Startup group (note: this is an ugly, ugly solution).
posted by box at 5:08 PM on July 20, 2005

Although almost all web-sites will do a cookie-based login using HTTP POST, many will still accept an HTTP GET, so some variation on the theme of adding a link to http://www.myserver.com/login?user=foo&pass=bar to the Startup group might work for you.

If this sounded like gobbledigook, install firefox and the Web Developer's Toolbar, go to your login page, select 'Convert POSTs to GETs' (or similar wording, I don't have it installed myself right now) from the toolbar, login, grab the URL now shown in the address bar, and copy'n'paste this into IE to see if that will log you in.

Note, of course, that you will always have to save the password somewhere, even if that's not inside of IE.
posted by rjt at 5:10 PM on July 20, 2005