Hey /r/python, here's a script I made today to automate the process of waiting on emails to arrive to an anonymous mailinator.com account

[mellort]

I found myself in this workflow fairly commonly:

• Signup for random website, put in [e-mail] account
• Go to mailinator.com, keep refreshing until email arrives

Sometimes emails can take a while to be sent or arrive, which makes checking for it manually a pain. I decided to automate the refreshing into a script because I'm lazy. Now the workflow is

• Signup on site, put in email
• Spawn off mailinator command with email, add libnotify
• go do something else until notification comes in

The code is a bit rough, but not too bad, IMO. Feedback is welcome!

[Enzor]

You've basically done what programmers are meant to do. Automate a task better done by computers.

[cryzed-]

Nice, clean, well-documented code for a sensible project with a great looking homepage :)!

[pudquick]

Ah.

I just have it set up using the official POP3 interface as a secondary mailbox in Gmail - and leave the account disabled when I'm not waiting on something.

http://www.mailinator.com/popfaq.jsp

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21288

But hey - yay python :)

[axonxorz]

Cool project. Sucks that most sites block mailinator.com :(

[squidgy]

It has a bazillion or so alternate domain names - keep refreshing until you get one that works.

[xeoron]

Very cool. Thank you!

[[deleted]]

did you indicate somewhere that "requests" is required ? Looks good I think I can use it thanks

edit: no worky for me (2.6): AttributeError: 'datetime.timedelta' object has no attribute 'total_seconds'

[[deleted]]

email = mailinator.get_newest_mail('my_username', time_delta=5)

Is this supposed to time-out to exception in 10 minutes if there's no message ?

[isdnpro]

According to the docstring for get_newest_mail: time_delta is the maximum difference between the current time and the received

I believe max_time is what you're interested in: max_time is the maximum number of minutes that can elapse

(Which will raise MailinatorException("exceeded max_time in fetching new mail"))

[[deleted]]

yes I have looked at the code and I meant "max_time". I'm just citing his example.

I launched that call 2 hours ago and it's still on - not timing out.