Better E-Mail Checking!
A mate of mine was reading this and made some great comments about it! First up there is a Bash version of expect (THANK GOD!). Secondly fetchmail maybe a better solution to grabbing the mail to see if it was received, another good comment! Unfortunately for me I was working on a system with the tools that were available to me, that means no fetchmail and no empty installed.
Interestingly it didn’t initially work 100% of the time, after a little bit of testing it looked like Microsoft were temporarily throwing away some of the test e-mails. Interesting as it must mean that they look for repetitious e-mails in a bid to fight SPAM. We of course simply contacted MS and got it sorted and now the e-mails come in every hour.
What this does show us though, is that under UNIX/Linux there is a lot of different solutions that can be made, but sometimes you have to work with the tools that are there.