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Remote Control E-Mail

Members of the ISP-Tech list find several ways to query a sales database and send the results of the query to the pager of the store's owner.

[May 28, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in April, JB queried,

"I have a client who wants a simple, small application that's controlled by e-mail. He needs to be able to send a string of parameters by e-mail to consolidate sales information from specific stores, then get the results in an e-mail. We gave him samples of what he could do with a Web browser, and he still insists on doing it by e-mail: he wants to be able to check on the sales of his business at any time and receive the results on his pager. Any ideas on how to do this?"

A number of respondents offered various suggestions:

[KW laughed] "That sounds exactly like the way I used to retrieve files and get results from Gopher servers about 8 or 9 years ago!"

[JM noted] "The application could be written in just about any language that can retrieve and then send out e-mail: Perl is probably a good candidate."

[DW added] "You could write something to do this in PHP, but you'd have to have an SMTP server set up just to sit there and wait for this guy to send a message."

[JJ offered] "Give Opalis a shot: I've used their e-mail robot in the past to some success."

[PM observed] "You can easily do this on UNIX. Take a look at the way Majordomo works. You basically set an alias that pipes to the program, then the program parses the mail."

JL suggested that, regardless of the method, this kind of program should be pretty simple to set up:

"Any e-mail client could periodically retrieve such messages from a specific mailbox set up on any standard e-mail server for the purpose. Retrieving e-mail from any POP3 server on demand is trivial Telnet programming. In fact, you can do it with any Telnet client that supports scripts. The customized programming would then simply 'read' the message, parse its commands, and then do whatever was appropriate with them. For a reasonably competent programmer in almost any language, none of it is rocket science."

Others considered the security issues:

[PM warned] "The only thing I would look out for is building in a security layer so that random spam couldn't trigger an unwanted response."

[VI contended] "It is fairly secure if you have set up a signature to look for—but you do need a reliable e-mail client, and you need the data in a perfect format."

Still others argued that it's much better to stick with the Web:

[DW scoffed] "Why the heck doesn't he just get a damn Web-enabled cell phone and use SSL on a web site?"

[JM agreed] "Use WAP, and forget the e-mail front end. How much faster and easier would it be to pull up a web form, make a selection or two, and then immediately see the report? Develop the application in PHP or ASP or Cold Fusion, depending on the platform. If he can read e-mail, maybe he already has WAP capability on his cell phone. If he really needs the report sent as e-mail, that's just as easy to do from any of those scripting languages. Without the need to pull e-mail, and parse it, you're probably looking at about 30 minutes of development time."

—End