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 18) 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 remote users.
Here are a few ideas to get you started with email-controlled webbots.
Design a webbot that forwards messages from a mailing list to your personal email address based upon references to a preset list of terms. (For example, the webbot could forward all messages that reference the words robot, web crawler, webbot, and spider.)
Develop a procurement bot that automatically reconfigures your eBay bidding strategy when it receives an email from eBay indicating that someone has outbid you.
Create a strategy that forwards an email message to a webbot that, in turn, displays the message on a 48-foot scrolling marquee that is outside your office building (assuming you have access to such a display!).
Here are a few ways you can capitalize on email-enabled webbots to interface different systems.
Develop a webbot that automatically updates your financial records based on email you receive from PayPal.
Create a webbot that automatically forwards all email with the word support in the subject line to the person working the help desk at that time.
Write a webbot that notifies you when one of your mail servers has reached its email (size) quota.
Write a service that interfaces shipping notification email messages from FedEx to your company’s fulfillment system.
Develop an email-to-fax service that faxes an email message to the phone number in the email’s subject line. (This isn’t hard to do if you have an old fax/modem from the last century lying around.)
Write a webbot that maintains statistics about your email accounts, indicating who is sending the most email, when servers are busiest, the number of messages that are deleted without being read, when servers fail, and email addresses that are returned as undeliverable.