If you own a cell phone (or phones) through Verizon Wireless and are like me, you may have exceeded your monthly free minutes a time or two.  Expensive!  And Verizon does not provide a method of alerting you when you're close to your maximum monthly minutes.  Lame!  After exceeding my monthly plan minutes one too many times and getting reamed by Verizon's over minute fees, I decided it was time to do something about it.  Of course you can log into www.verizonwireless.com and check your minutes usage manually, but who wants to (or remembers to) do that all that time? 

Enter AutoHotkey and Blat.  AutoHotkey is an awesome Windows macro tool that allows automation of almost anything, and it has a very powerful built-in macro language.  Blat is a command-line e-mailer.  Both are open source and 100% free.  Using these two tools, I was able to write a script (.ahk file) that automates logging into Verizon's website, clicking through the various screens, and capturing the total minutes used for my account.  It then does some simple math to determine if I'm in jeopardy of exceeding my monthly minutes and, if so, sends me an e-mail saying as much.  Using Windows Task Scheduler I'm able to have the script run once a day whenever my computer sits idle for a few minutes, or I can just double-click the script file and run it manually.

Because this has worked so well for me and saved countless dollars, I'm making the script available for all to use (open source.)  You can view/download it here (right-click to Save it to your computer.)

Note that you'll need to change some things in the script to get it working on your computer, namely the screen coordinates for the various text boxes and buttons that AutoHotkey clicks on.  You can use a tool that comes with AutoHotkey called AutoIt3.  Just fire up Internet Explorer along with this tool and find/change the appropriate x,y coordinates that are referenced in the script (there are only a few of them.)  There is also a user variables section for setting your login information and e-mail address.

Hopefully after these few tweaks the script will work for you.  There is no doubt areas where it could be improved and made more robust.  Feel free to make your own contributions to the code!