PureBasic Forums - English

Is it possible to write a program to receive email sent to your computer in order to process what it says in order to take an action. Like I could send an email to my computer with the words shutdown and then the computer would shutdown?

For anyone questioning what it is for is to speed up a program I wrote which tracks buses for arrival time. Sending an email from your phone, my computer would receive it, process the times, and then spit an email back.

If I were you I would make a tiny server that would only take a certain command that you can access because you know what port address to send the command at!

Then you only have to send that command from a tiny KILLSWITCH program and you can put multiple computers in this listing and kill one or all etc.

Well the purpose is to be at a bus stop, send a text message (to an email address) and the arrival times of buses are sent back to your phone. It works perfectly right now running off my website's mail server, just not as fast as I would like. It seems like the email takes some time to be received.

So why don't you just install some mail server software on your own PC? You probably don't have to write your own.

Maybe an instant messaging solution?

cheers

Hello,

This certainly sounds like something I am developing for the BlackBerry platform. A type of "push information service". I write code in Java, but am only experienced in developing for BlackBerry, so my code might be useless for you even if your smartphone supports Java.

What I have already, a proof of concept, is an application with programmable interface to download/fetch any data from the Web. In other words I can simply launch the application and in a matter of seconds, get the arrival times of buses and view them directly without waiting for an e-mail. Does this sound like something you might benefit from?

Your current problem is not really the website's mail server, it's the smartphone. You do not have a way to configure push e-mail, do you? Without push e-mail, you will ALWAYS have to wait.

Another option, maybe you want to subscribe for an unlimited data plan and simply bookmark the website with the arrival times for buses and use your smartphone's browser to get the information you need.

Running out of ideas

thanks, but on the wrong track... I want to utilize any phone with text messaging to use the service. Text the stop your at, and then a text comes back with the bus times. Its for a large range of people, not everyone has an unlimited internet plan.

Your idea does sound great though.

Right now my program allows you to send a text message to an email address. My web server (through cpanel) forwards the email to a PHP script. The script than sends an email to the from address, which really sends a text message back to the phone.

Matt wrote:Is it possible to write a program to receive email sent to your computer ... would shutdown?

What you need is the whole SOURCE CODE of your operating system!!!

So for example let's talk about a 100 000 lines personal operating system, with FULL source code. It would be very possible that someone helps you to add this SHUTDOWN with email event...

RemyVincent wrote:

Matt wrote:Is it possible to write a program to receive email sent to your computer ... would shutdown?

What you need is the whole SOURCE CODE of your operating system!!!

So for example let's talk about a 100 000 lines personal operating system, with FULL source code. It would be very possible that someone helps you to add this SHUTDOWN with email event...

? ...

yyeah, windows without the whole source code is really hard to use, i don't know why, it would be so easy to compile all the source code on our computers...

Matt wrote:Is it possible to write a program to receive email sent to your computer in order to process what it says in order to take an action. Like I could send an email to my computer with the words shutdown and then the computer would shutdown?

If you're using Outlook, you can set it to execute an app (yours to shutdown the PC) if keywords are matched in emails.

Otherwise, try this -> http://www.runtime.org/remotebymail.htm

Outlook and that program would be too slow receiving through imap or pop. It needs to be faster... those solutions are no different then how I have it now.

Outlook is so good, you know, i have used outlook dozen of times... and i was coding at the same time!, 80% of the received emails were automatic emails from MY SOFTWARE, ... I swear i was coding at the same time, with no limitation because of the dozen of emails received with outlook each day ...

So with outlook it is very possible to receive those SHUTDOWN EMAILS, ... but you could also receive dozen of other automatic emails, ... EACH DAY ...

Matt wrote:Outlook and that program would be too slow receiving through imap or pop. It needs to be faster... those solutions are no different then how I have it now.

Why too slow? It's no different to receiving emails any other way. You do know you can set Outlook to check for mail every 1 minute? Or do you want it faster than that? Isn't 1 minute between processing your commands fast enough?

Matt wrote:I could send an email to my computer with the words shutdown and then the computer would shutdown?

I see no problem here.

Hi maybe you didn't read what I really wanted done

You send a text message with your location (a bus stop) and the program calculates when the next bus comes and then sends a text message back with the bus arrival time. It works right now fine by allowing my emails on my server to be forwarded to a script (using cpanel). However there does still seem to be a delay with the server receiving the email. That's why I was wondering if there is a way to create a email receive server type application.