How HTML met Email

April 6, 2006 4:47 AM

Email to Web? Or, help me play songs on my computer with my cellphone.

On a whim last night, I thought, "wouldn't it be nice to play songs on my computer, queued from my cellphone?" To have a favorite song waiting as I walk in from a rainy day.. et cetera.

Anyhow inspired by that, I whipped up a quick hack: a cronjob running a program that downloads a file off the internet, checks via md5 whether it has been updated, and if it has, grabs the string containing the song name and uses applescript to play via iTunes. (I'm on a Mac.) So far it works, except for the file off the internet part -- I've been using dodgeit.com for anonymous email, so I can send a text message to the email address, there's no authentication process and therefore the rss file can be accessible with a shell script.

The problem is that the anonymous email has a long (read:5min) delay in recieving emails for this to be any real fun. I'm sure it's the anonymous delay, because gmail recieves email-texts sent from my phone almost instantaneously.

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Long story short -- I need to be able to somehow post an email on the internet, as a text file preferably -- but somehow so I can access it without having to hop through any touchy authentication processes.

Any ideas how I can do this?

Thanks!

posted by provolot to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Is your cellphone bluetooth enabled?

If so maybe Salling clicker might do the job.
posted by twistedonion at 5:30 AM on April 6, 2006

Have the cronjob get the email directly from a POP server with getmail or fetchmail.
posted by zsazsa at 5:41 AM on April 6, 2006

Also, if you'd rather not do that, Mailinator has unauthenticated email addresses with RSS feeds and is instantaneous (I just tested it).
posted by zsazsa at 5:46 AM on April 6, 2006

Yeah, sounds like you want Sailing Clicker. With the right configurations (open internet on your phone, and a port pass through on your router at home), you could use Sailing Clicker to run your computer from across the world.
posted by jeversol at 9:13 AM on April 6, 2006

Does your cel phone have a web browser? Could you trigger this with a listening CGI instead of email? Then you could authenticate it however you want.
posted by jozxyqk at 11:28 AM on April 6, 2006

No, no web browser, only a text-msg to email capability..

And zsazsa -- mailinator isn't instantaneous. Gmail messages take forever to show up?..
posted by provolot at 7:37 PM on April 6, 2006

That's Gmail's problem; they can be slow to send and receive mail. Mail sent directly from my own mail server gets there immediately. So does mail sent from Yahoo mail. I've always been impressed with the speed of Yahoo's sending and receiving.
posted by zsazsa at 1:33 PM on April 7, 2006

A POP solution could easily be the way to go; it's got authentication, which could be nice in the future and... well, mostly that.

However, if you are looking at the DodgeIt-like services, try out shortmail.net- I have been really impressed with their anonymous email system. They don't have many ads, it is fast and they have any feature you could ask for (for instance, rss feeds). And when you decide that it is the best thing that you've ever heard of, shoot them a donation. It is always good to keep good things from sinking.
posted by tysiva at 11:50 PM on April 11, 2006