[Tutor] Notes and Yahoo Mails via SMTP to Yahoo Messenger

[dman]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:39:35PM +0000, James Foo wrote:
| 
| Hi,
| 
| I am looking for any hints that can lead me to a solution for the
| following scenario using Python: -- I need to read some messages
| from Lotus Notes mail as well as from Yahoo mail

What protocols do these servers support?  POP3 and IMAP4 are the
standard internet mail retrieval protocols, and python has built-in
libraries to deal with these (called poplib and imaplib respectively).

If the servers don't support the open protocol standards, then :

A worst-case scenario for Yahoo would be to build some HTML
interaction software that can submit a form (just a special URL) and
then parse the results to give you the data back.  Basically your
program would appear to be you with a web browser as far as yahoo is
concerned.

For Lotus, it may require learning their protocol (reverse
engineering, most likely) so you can implement it.  If you're lucky
there might be a C or C++ library providing protocol support that you
can wrap to provide a python interface.

| and via the SMTP, send them to Yahoo Messenger.

SMTP is very easy, and python includes the 'smtplib' module so you
don't have to do much work at all.

HTH,
-D