You can design an email-wielding webbot to help you identify illegitimate members of a members-only website. If someone has access to a business-to-business website but is no longer employed by a company that uses the site, that person probably also lost access to his or her corporate email address; any email sent to that account will be returned as undeliverable. You could design a webbot that periodically sends some type of report to everyone who has access to the website. Any emails that return as undeliverable will alert you to a member's email address that is no longer valid. Your webbot can then track these undeliverable emails and deactivate former employees from your list of members.

It's handy to have an indication that a webbot has actually run. A simple email at the end of the webbot's session can inform you that it ran and what it did. Often, the actual content of these email notifications is not as significant as the emails themselves, which indicate that a webbot ran successfully. Similarly, you can use email notifications to tell you exactly when and how a webbot has failed.

Since wireless email clients like cell phones and BlackBerries allow people to use email away from their desks, your webbots can effectively use email in more situations than they could only a few years ago. Think about applications where webbots can exploit mobile email technology. For example, you could write a webbot that checks the status of your server and sends warnings to people when they're away from the office. You could also develop a webbot that sends an instant message when your company is mentioned on CNN.com.

Many wireless carriers support email interfaces for text messaging, or short message service (SMS). These messages appear as text on cell phones, and many people find them to be less intrusive than voice messages. To send a text message, you simply email the message to one of the email-to-text message addresses provided by wireless carriers—a task you could easily hand off to a webbot. Appendix C contains a list of email-to-text message addresses; if you can't find your carrier in this list, contact its customer service department to see if it provides this service.