Re: lynx-dev Persistent cookies between batch-mode Lynx calls?

[David Woolley]

> 
> Does Lynx clean out / erase its cookie file between sessions (be they
> interactive or command line mode)? Does Lynx simply not save/handle cookies

It is required by the cookie standards to discard session cookies (the more
benign type) between sessions.  If this is your problem, it arises because
you are using a broader definition of a session than most browsers use -
most browsers equate a single run of the program with a session.

However, I do tend to feel that trying to automate something like
hotmail is a mis-direction of effort, which is doomed to be always 
fighting changes in the service.  If hotmail wanted you to automate
things, they would provide pop3 mail boxes.  If they don't, I think
it may well be because they intensely dislike people who bypass the
advertising that they add.

If you still want to do this sort of thing, I would suggest a better
approach would be to use a Perl HTTP module and use Perl to interact
with the site.  You can then use Lynx to render the captured HTML,
although, for plain text email, if the HTML is well constructed, 
you can probably parse it out with a simple HTML parser, yourself.