[cons0005@algnet.algonquinc.on.ca wrote:] I was wondering if anyone knows of such a creature that I could send email to with an URL, and I would get a reply of that HTML file? example I email bot@somewhere.com with the Subject:http://www.hotmail.com and I will get an email of the HTML file at www.hotmail.com This would be handy because I don't have a broswer (2 meg RAM (I know)) and also for anonymity, cookies etc I couldn't be traced. ----- Actually you can do that really very easily. If you are interested in such Bot's. I really recommend you get O'Reilly's book: Web Client Programming, with Perl. It discusses to a large degree what your wanting to do. It has full source code as well, so you can take that and just fiddle with a bit until it suits your needs. Provided you or someone you know can program in Perl. I think one method you could do is to just use a majordomo server and tinker with it to suit the reception needs. Or you could on your own box, or a friends box. Make an account to the name you want, set up a resident program, with nohup or a simple cron job. Or do some script, that would serve equally as well. That could handle the reception facilities well enough. Then just use the modified bot to handle the HTML queries and sending and there you go. Although sending things back to the HTTP server in question might... interesting. If that place GET and POST methods for CGI scripts and dynamic pages, that raises some questions. Particularly, if the bot sends you the HTML doc that it requested, you view the page, yadda yadda yadda. It depends on how you want to work it and do it, you have to ask yourself. Do I want to send my request (whatever that maybe)from my machine? The request would go through. But it would be through your machine, and that would invalidate your anonymity. So thats a Bad Thing(tm) and out of the question. Or in cases like yours, the user might not have a browser. So that leaves it to us sending our request back to our automated little daemon and it does it for us. It would require just a little bit of handling and work to do the GET and POST methods for the CGI program your interacting with, but that would be minimal I think. I could be wrong however. In effect your using the bot as a kind of proxy for HTTP requests. If your really, REALLY desperate I might be able to quickly just put something together for you and post it here for you(or if another cypherpunk thats into Perl wants to do it, or if anyone else has any ideas). But you should be able to modify the code to suit whatever you want it to do. I've been experimenting with something similar, only on a slightly different note. If your patient, you can just subscribe to a majordomo "admin-help" list. Where the details of running such a thing are discussed by people that do. I'm sure one quite possibly exists somewhere. Then log on to a Bot mailing list and after hanging out on both for a while, asking a few questions perhaps you should be able to put something together I expect. Or as mgraffam@mhv.net suggests you could log into those machines and do it that way. Which gives me another idea, you could have the bot run lynx remotely and then pipe the output from that to the letter it would send you and visa versa. But that makes things more complicated as well too. I question the value of doing that as well, I think the overhead would be a bit much, as well as being a slight hassle. I think over all, the easiest thing to do would be to possibly follow mgraffam's suggestion and just do that. Those are my thoughts on things at least. I hope they help. I think the security possibilities of such a bot could be useful and could make a interesting discussion perhaps. There was one thread earlier that was discussing one such robot. From a government location, that was keeping tabs on crypto related sources. Crawling from link to link, from behind a firewall etc, etc, etc. If theres any more news relating to that thread, thats been uncovered I'd be interested in hearing more on it. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com