I know the title of this post sounds sinister - but my goals are noble (bet you've heard that one before!).

I'm trying to find a way for our application to 'listen' and respond to messages coming in on an Instant Message utility (pick your flavor, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc.). Since it appears that none of these services provide an API and/or ActiveX library for integrating with their service, I was wondering (hoping!) that there might be some API magic that would allow us to monitor a window (the Instant Message utility's window identified by window title) and 'listen'/'watch' for updates to its instant message edit control window. Our application would grab these updates, parse out the updates being sent to us (vs. sent by us), and then use Sendkeys or similar to post our replies back.

I'm curious if anyone has some ideas and/or code that might address the feasiability of this technique. Or other ideas to accomplish the same goal.

Thanks!
Malcolm