Further Exploration

With a little thought, you can devise many creative uses for webbots that can access email accounts. There are two general areas that may serve as inspiration.

  • Use email as a means to control webbots. For example, you could use an email message to tell a spider which domain to use as a target, or you could send an email to a procurement bot (featured in Chapter 19) to indicate which items to purchase.

  • Use an email-enabled webbot to interface incompatible systems. For example, you could upload a small file to an FTP sever from a BlackBerry if the file (the contents of the email) were sent to a special webbot that, after reading the email, sent the file to the specified server. This could effectively connect a legacy system to ...

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