POP3

I never realised just how simple this protocol really is. I've just knocked together, within one or two minutes, a Perl script that checks how many emails are waiting for me on the POP server. Originally I had this script running in the bash prompt, but someone told me that Information Services have been known to ban people from the mail servers for excessively checking their email. So I set it to run as a cron job every two minutes instead and store the result in a file, which the bash prompt picks up.

Maybe when I get more time I will re-implement it as an IMAP script that can detect actual new messages rather than just returning the number of mails in my inbox. That, and maybe move my password for the entire UWA network out of the script and into a safer location ...