Linux.Desktop.Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 56. Read Yahoo! Mail from Any Email Client

Use your Yahoo! webmail account in a normal
email client.

A few years back webmail exploded
onto the scene. It was new, it
was cool, and it enabled you to read your email from any computer
with Internet 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, deleting and moving mail with webmail is a tedious
process that involves selecting 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.

8.3.1. 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 information 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 from http://fetchyahoo.twizzler.org/, and extract
the tarball:

foo@bar:~$ tar xcvf  fetchyahoo-x-x-x .tar.gz

The directory that is extracted will have the version number in it,
so you should rename it to a simpler directory name (this is useful
if you create a cronjob later, as you can upgrade the script without
having to update the cronjob entry):

foo@bar:~$ mv  fetchyahoo-x-x-x  fetchyahoo

You need to replace fetchyahoo-x-x-x with
whatever directory name is extracted from the tarball.

8.3.2. Configure the Script

The FetchYahoo script
needs to have a properly configured
fetchyahoorc configuration file that specifies
your login details and configures certain options in the script. A
fetchyahoorc file is included within the main
tarball, and you can configure it by loading it into a text editor.
You can locate this file anywhere on your system as you will call it
with an absolute path later, but keeping personal configuration files
in your home directory is always a good idea.

The most important parts to configure are at the top of the file.
Like many other Linux configuration files, each option has the format
option_keyword =
setting. For example, username
= johnsmith sets the
username option to johnsmith.
To get started, you need to set the username and password options to
your Yahoo! account settings (you don't need to put
these settings in double quotes, as with other configuration files).
It is also advisable that you set use-https
= 1 to ensure secure
communications between your computer and the mail server.

The spool option is another important setting. This indicates where
your mail spool (the place where your mail is
stored) is located on your Linux system. Most distributions place
this in a file with your account name inside the
/var/spool/mail/ directory. As an example, the
user bob would have his mail spool at
/var/spool/mail/bob. To check this, have a poke
around /var/spool/mail and see if the username
exists in thereevery user should have a mail spool file. If
you don't have a mail spool (such as if your mail
client cannot read mail from a spool), you can have the mail stored
in maildir format by adding a slash (/) to the
spool setting (e.g., /var/spool/mail/); this
directory will contain the mailbox.

A variety of other options are in the configuration file, and each
one is documented inside the file itself. These options control how
much mail is delivered, if attachments are delivered, whether to
empty the bulk mail directory, and other useful functions.

It is recommended that when you first use
FetchYahoo, you should set
no-delete =
1 so that your Yahoo! mail won't
be deleted when running the script. When you are confident the script
is working, set no-delete back to
0 so that it will delete the mail on the server,
once it has been successfully received.

8.3.3. Run the Script

With the configuration file set up, execute the script by simply
running:

foo@bar:~$ fetchyahoo --configfile=fetchyahoorc

The first time you run the script against a Yahoo! account containing
lots of email messages, you might find the script downloads only some
of the mail before exiting with an error. This is usually because the
Yahoo! server is set up to deny malicious requests that bombard it
with traffic, and it misinterprets your use of the
FetchYahoo script as one of these malicious
programs. If you get an error such as this, visit the web interface
to Yahoo! mail, and if you cannot log in, this is likely what
happened. To resolve this problem, simply leave the server alone for
a few minutes and then try to access the web interface againif
you can log in, the server has recovered and you can run
FetchYahoo again. It might take a number of runs
to get all your email transferred to your computer. You do not
encounter this problem when downloading only a few emails at regular
intervals.

8.3.4. Automate FetchYahoo with cron

Most people who use email want to check it regularly. With this in
mind, you ideally want to run FetchYahoo every
few minutes to update your mail spool with new emails, but you
don't want to have to manually rerun the command
every time; repetitive tasks such as this are what computers are for.
To solve this problem, use cron to automate running the script [Hack #70] . First, you should edit your
crontab:

foo@bar:~$ crontab -e

If you want to run the fetchyahoo command every
three minutes, you can use the following cronjob:

*/3 * * * * /sources/fetchyahoo/fetchyahoo --configfile=/sources/fetchyahoo/
fetchyahoorc

In this cronjob, you are running the script every three minutes on
every day, month, and year. It includes a full path to the location
of the script because you have not installed the
FetchYahoo script to your path, so you need to
specify its path to the system. You also need to give a full path to
the location of the configuration file.