Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Tag: email

  • #tlah Push notifications on the cheap

    Taking control of your notifications is nice, but sometimes you want to be able to customize alerts. For iOS there are apps such as Boxcar, Pushover, and App Notifications. These apps are nice and do the job, but they require a little more setup and/or they cost. As I was working on my iPhone for a replacement, I realized that the built in email app can have different notification types for each email account (such as sound, vibration, etc). So I started to play around, and set up a different Yahoo! account to use for notifications on my phone. My email accounts are set to silent, except for this new Yahoo! account and my VIP list. Now when I want to be notified right away, I use this email account. Under GMail I filter emails from various accounts and forward them to my new email account. As soon as I get them, I get a new notification.

    This convoluted mess could be done with the VIP list feature of iOS, but I wanted to separate my VIPs from other notifications.

  • Organize your email with a Flagged folder

    I have multiple email accounts, and read it from various devices. It’s
    all based on IMAP, so folders, messages read, etc. stay the same
    from device to device. The problem I was having was when I’d read a
    message on my iPod Touch or Samsung Omnia (a Windows Mobile
    cellphone). Sometimes it would be a message that I would need to act on,
    but can’t right at that moment. A lot of email clients allow you to flag
    a message so you can remember to go back to it, but that’s not an option
    on my iPod Touch or the Omnia. At first I’d just
    mark the messages unread, but that also gets messy (not knowing if I
    have new messages because of the unread indicator).

    What I’ve done now is to create a folder called Flagged for each one of
    my email accounts. Now when I get a message I need to act upon it later,
    I’ll move it to this Flagged folder.

    Sometimes I will just forward the message to my Remember the Milk
    account, but that’s a post for another day. 🙂

    ![][]

  • Group Twitter bot

    Chris Hamady had the idea that at the eTech Ohio State Technology
    Conference     we should be able to use Twitter to communicate
    great things that individuals see throughout the conference. It needed
    to be set up easy enough for people that have not been using Twitter to
    use. After discussions with John Schinker, they contacted me and I came
    up with the idea of a twitter bot that people would follow, and direct
    messages to that bot would be sent to all the bot’s followers. This way
    most people can just follow the bot and get updates, and those that
    wanted to send out an update would only need to send a direct message to
    the bot with the update.

    The way the bot works is off of the emails that Twitter sends out when a
    Twitter account receives a notification of a new follower or a direct
    message. The requirements for the bot are:
    • A twitter account (in this case it is etechohio09)
    • An email account with POP3 access (in this case a gmail account is
    used. This email account address needs to be secret because there isn’t
    any checking on the validity of where an email came from so this would
    allow people without even a Twitter account to spam the bot)
    • a unix based host with php at the command line (I use Ubuntu, but it
    should work in OS X)
    • fetchmail also needs to be available

    The process to set up the bot is as follows:
    1. An email account is set up at gmail. This account must of pop3
    turned on, which you can do from the gmail settings.
    2. Create a Twitter account, using the above email account. In Twitter
    be sure to go to Settings -> Notices and have the notices for followers
    and direct messages checked.
    3. Set up an account on the unix host for the bot.
    4. Login to the account on the unix host.
    5. Create the .fetchmailrc:

         nano -w .fetchmailrc

    ​6. Enter the following lines to that file:

         set logfile /home/UNIXACCOUNT/fetchmail.log

     poll "pop.gmail.com" proto POP3 timeout 100 no uidl
     no envelope user "[email protected]"
     password "BOTPASSWORD" fetchlimit 100 ssl

    ​7. Create the logfile:

         touch fetchmail.log

    ​8. Create the .forward file:

         nano -w .forward

    ​9. Enter the following line:

         |"/home/UNIXACCOUNT/twitterbot.php"

    ​10. Download [twitterbot.php][], and make it executable:

         chmod +x twitterbot.php

    ​11. Edit twitterbot.php and enter your Twitter username and password:

         nano twitterbot.php

    ​12. Start up fetchmail in daemon mode and your bot should be
    functional.

         fetchmail -d 60

    What will happen is that fetchmail will check the email account every 60
    seconds. Any email will be downloaded and each message passed to
    twitterbot.php. twitterbot.php will examing the headers for the twitter
    command and then act accordingly. If it is a new follower, twitterbot
    will start following that person. If it is a direct message, twitterbot
    will then post that message to the bot’s timeline for all its followers
    to read.

    The email class used for this twitterbot came from phpclasses.org,
    modified to pull out a few of the X-headers that Twitter adds so the bot
    can figure out the type of message and who is sending it.

  • Why do students need email?

    [![][]][]On the Ohio Technology Coordinator’s listserv this question was
    posted:

    > We already had one case of student to teacher generated e-mail that
    > originated on a student computer inside the school. The FIRST question
    > I got as the Tech Director was ‘Why are you allowing students to send
    > and receive email in school?’
    >

    And my question would be, “Why are you letting them use pencil and
    paper? They could be sending notes to other students or staff!”. For
    discipline we do not distinguish between computer generated or person
    generated correspondence. The punishment may change if it’s on the
    computer because they’d lose computer privileges due to the AUP.

    You’re not going to be able to stop it. A student could simply fire up
    telnet and use your existing mail server to send email to whoever
    they want, saying anything they want.

    No access to telnet on the machine? Then throw up a Java telnet client
    on any old web host and access it from there. Actually, if I wanted to
    get around a school’s filters, this is the route I’d probably go. Once I
    get SSH somewhere, I can get full access to the Internet, and it only
    requires port 80, a web browser, and Java. (This is what I use at places
    that have network access locked down. I open a SSH tunnel over port 443
    to my home computer, and then have full access to anything on the
    Internet.)

    Not only is email use part of the State of Ohio Technology Standards, it
    is our job as teachers to educate the students on the proper use of
    email. How to use it, what’s appropriate, etc. Part of the problem with
    the garbage that students send through email is that they’ve never seen
    anything else. It’s pretty foreign for them to see an email message with
    proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (I hope I have everything
    correct in this post! 🙂

    I bet you have students right now using a free email services, ssh
    tunnels, etc.

    We like to think we have things locked down, but unless you’re working
    for the NSA, you do not have it locked down. Education of the students,
    punishment for inappropriate behavior is a good way to go. We as
    Technology Coordinators we have a habit of putting up technological road
    blocks instead of solving the real problems.

    Thunderbird Email

    []: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30735542@N00/215738569

  • SYSK – Test your SMTP mail server with telnet

    Network packet trace of SMTP connection
    [Creative Commons License][] photo credit:
    TalkingTree    When troubleshooting email, it may be
    necessary to see what the email server is spitting out, just to make
    sure everything is working. The easiest way to do that is to use the
    telnet command. Telnet allows you to connect to various services on
    remote or local machines through the command line. Today we are going to
    be using it to send some email. You’ll first need to bring up the
    command-line on your respective operating system. First see if telnet is
    installed. Type:
    telnet
    And you should see something like this:
    Welcome to Microsoft Telnet Client

    Escape Character is 'CTRL+]'

    Microsoft Telnet>?
    Or this:
    telnet>
    Since that works, type quit to exit telnet. Next, we need to open a
    connection to our mail server. We will need to know the name or ip
    address of the mail server:
    telnet mail.example.com 25
    (The 25 is the port number that SMTP runs on.) You should then get a
    response back from your mail server:

    Trying 10.0.0.18... Connected to mail.example.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.example.com ESMTP Postfix
    The server is now waiting for a command. We need to say Hello. (* For
    the remaining examples I’m going to use the domain example.com. You’ll
    need to replace that with your local domain name. *)
    helo example.com
    Which returns:
    250 mail.example.com
    The mail server now needs to know who is sending the email:
    mail from: [email protected]
    Returns:
    250 Ok
    Who are you sending the mail to?
    rcpt to: [email protected]
    Returns:
    250 Ok
    Now it is time to tell it the message:
    data
    Returns:
    354 End data with .
    Enter your message:
    Subject: test message This is a test message .
    To end the message, you need to put a period at the beginning of the
    line and hit the return key. Now your message is on its way!
    Now type quit to exit
    quit

    [Creative Commons License]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
    “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License”