A free email → AIM gateway (geekery)
Well there's one now.
Main Usage
From your AIM account, send a message to Hikensha, who is a little bit odd but will be able to get you going, if you can figure out how to communicate. Then if you would like to send a message to your AIM account from email, send a message with your AIM username as the subject and the message text as the body. For example, this message:
From: me@example.com
To: hikensha@beesbuzz.biz
Subject: plaidfluff
doot doot doot
will send an IM with the text "doot doot doot" to my AIM account.
Outlook
This is particularly useful with this Outlook hack if you want to, say, send IM notifications to your Sidekick about a meeting reminder but you're not allowed to synchronize Outlook with the Sidekick for whatever reason (such as an IT department with a healthy sense of paranoia). Or if you just want to keep your work calendar separate from your home calendar. Or if you want to automatically send IMs to your computer or whatever.The exact Outlook macro I use is this (only changed slightly from MS's example in order to format the message for Hikensha):
Private Sub Application_Reminder(ByVal Item As Object)
If Item.Sensitivity <> olConfidential Then
If TypeOf Item Is AppointmentItem Then SendApptReminder Item
If TypeOf Item Is MailItem Then SendMailReminder Item
If TypeOf Item Is TaskItem Then SendTaskReminder Item
End If
End Sub
Private Sub SendApptReminder(ByRef Item As AppointmentItem)
SendPage Item.Subject & vbCrLf & FormatDateTime(Item.Start, vbShortTime) & _
"-" & FormatDateTime(Item.End, vbShortTime) & vbCrLf & _
Item.Location
End Sub
Private Sub SendMailReminder(ByRef Item As MailItem)
SendPage "Mail: " & Item.Subject
End Sub
Private Sub SendTaskReminder(ByRef Item As TaskItem)
SendPage "Task: " & Item.Subject & vbCrLf & Item.Body
End Sub
Private Sub SendPage(ByRef Body As String)
Dim oEmail As Object
Set oEmail = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
oEmail.Subject = "plaidfluff"
oEmail.Body = Body
oEmail.Recipients.Add "hikensha@beesbuzz.biz"
oEmail.Send
End SubSo what this does is when, say, a meeting reminder comes up in Outlook, it sends the following message:
To: hikensha@beesbuzz.bizwhich then appears on my phone as an IM. Then, I have a custom buddy message alert for hikensha so that it makes a sound and vibrates.
From: [redacted]@[employer].com
Subject: plaidfluffBroomball practice
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
PAC Lawn
Let's practice Broomball so we can get better.
By the way, I highly recommend self-signing the macro so that you can safely run it without getting a prompt every time you start Outlook. The short of it is that you run Digital Certificate For VBA Projects (buried under 'Microsoft Office Tools'), generate a certificate, then in the macro editor go to |Tools >Digital Signature and then click on "Choose." The rest should be self-explanatory.
Notes
I don't run the server this runs on so don't hammer it too hard, please. If anyone abuses it I'll probably just take it down since I don't want to have to add rate throttling and so on (this is supposed to be for occasional instant notifications), so don't ruin it for everyone. I'll release the source later after I get a chance to clean it up.The AIM side is a bot which runs on a slightly-modified version of PHPTocLib, and the email side is a procmail recipe which feeds a shell script which calls a Perl script (I'll probably consolidate both those parts into a single script but I like doing process control stuff better in sh than in Perl).
Hikensha's command prompt is inscrutable on purpose. Just remember that it's not having a conversation with you, it just has a strange way of saying "bad command or filename."
Also, it should go without saying but this is non-guaranteed. I only set this up for my own jollies and because I find it offensive that AOL would charge something like $30/month for this basic level of functionality.
Comments
I mean, I don't know anything about that Outlook stuff, but as far as I can tell that's what I'm supposed to do. Am I dumb, or is it just not quite ready for prime time?
Try again.
Of course I think the setup I had was nice in terms of its simplicity and built-in authentication. Maybe I should just release the (very trivial) source to Hikensha with the hopes that someone else make it stable and usable?
i was under the impression that you had taken it down due to lack of use? Is this not the case? Thanks
fluffy: