anywhere on the planet given that make my living traveling around the world teaching python classesthis wild accessibility was big win as with website maintenancetimes have changed on this front somewhere along the waymost isps began offering web-based email access with similar portability and dropped telnet altogether when my isp took away telnet accesshoweverthey also took away one of my main email access methods luckilypython came to the rescue again--by writing email access scripts in pythoni could still read and send email from any machine in the world that has python and an internet connection python can be as portable solution as telnetbut much more powerful moreoveri can still use these scripts as an alternative to tools suggested by the isp besides my not being fond of delegating control to commercial products of large companiesclosed email tools impose choices on users that are not always ideal and may sometimes fail altogether in many waysthe motivation for coding python email scripts is the same as it was for the larger guis in the scriptability of python programs can be decided advantage for examplemicrosoft outlook historically and by default has preferred to download mail to your pc and delete it from the mail server as soon as you access it this keeps your email box small (and your isp happy)but it isn' exactly friendly to people who travel and use multiple machines along the way--once accessedyou cannot get to prior email from any machine except the one to which it was initially downloaded worsethe web-based email interfaces offered by my isps have at times gone offline completelyleaving me cut off from email (and usually at the worst possible timethe next two scripts represent one first-cut solution to such portability and reliability constraints (we'll see others in this and later the firstpopmail pyis simple mail reader toolwhich downloads and prints the contents of each email in an email account this script is admittedly primitivebut it lets you read your email on any machine with python and socketsmoreoverit leaves your email intact on the serverand isn' susceptible to webmail outages the secondsmtpmail pyis one-shot script for writing and sending new email message that is as portable as python itself later in this we'll implement an interactive console-based email client (pymail)and later in this book we'll code full-blown gui email tool (pymailguiand web-based email program of our own (pymailcgifor nowwe'll start with the basics mail configuration module before we get to the scriptslet' first take look at common module they import and use the module in example - is used to configure email parameters appropriately for particular user it' simply collection of assignments to variables used by mail programs that appear in this bookeach major mail client has its own versionto allow client-side scripting