[Techtalk] Possibly OT - learning to code using an email noti fication program

[jennyw]

On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 10:05, Davis, Jennifer wrote:
> Unless I can figure out some way to run ssh on an open port, I am stuck.
> They blocked the ssh port too.  Does anyone know a windows program that will
> reveal which outbound ports are open?

Not necessarily. Am I correct in assuming that the e-mail account in
question is outside of work and that you normally pick up e-mail via the
Web?  If so, then your script could check e-mail the same way you do --
over the Web. Perl, for example, has packages that you can use to read a
URL. You should be able to get this to work over https, too (I haven't
tried the latter, so I don't know how difficult it is).

A note on security -- if you currently read e-mail via http, then your
account info is sent in plain text. As Jenn (gosh, there sure are a lot
of us with similar first names) pointed out, this would be bad ... If
your Web mail is setup with https, then you'd probably be best writing a
script that accesses your Webmail client over https.

For what it's worth, I don't think writing this script should be too
tricky if you keep to the basics (just displaying info in text to begin
with).

Hope we've given you food for thought!

Jen