Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 8, Desktop Programs

#56 Read Yahoo! Mail from Any Email Client

HACK

access. In an age when people were increasingly using computers at work,

school, and home, webmail was a natural progression for email access.

Despite the benefit of reading your email on any computer with a web

browser, the very fact that the browser is your client is a tad limiting. Aside

from the issue that webmail is slower than a normal email program, delet-

ing and moving mail with webmail is a tedious process that involves select-

ing lots of checkboxes and waiting while the web site slowly updates your

mailbox. Therefore, many people have opted to use alternative methods to

access their webmail accounts using traditional email clients. However, not

all webmail accounts allow access methods, such as POP3 and IMAP, so

users have to use clever workarounds. This hack covers one such method to

retrieve email from a Yahoo! email account.

Using FetchYahoo

To solve the problem of getting your email from the Yahoo! server into your

own mailbox, the FetchYahoo script was written to screen-scrape the informa-

tion from the web site. This screen-scraping involves connecting to the Yahoo!

site, picking out the right bits of information from the HTML, and sending

them back to your computer in the form of usable email. When combined

with a few other tools, FetchYahoo is an invaluable piece of software.

To begin, grab FetchYahoo ...