Re: VB code to check POP3 account

In article <BjcGe.47$vI1.19467@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Tom Shelton wrote:
> In article <42e91e7f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, David L. Beem wrote:
>> Hello All,
>> Regular lurker, irregular poster here. Sorry for pushing what should be
>> my homework off, but I am looking for some hints to help me use less time &
>> a push to get started. I thought of the application (maybe already done
>> somewhere) a couple years ago & hadn't gone much further.
>> The program would poll a distinct POP3 account on a regular basis to
>> see if a message arrived in a particular format (see below). If a match, the
>> text of the message goes through DDE to an alpha pager program to be sent to
>> the correct pager. I've done the VB code to DDE to the alpha page program a
>> few years ago, so it is only the POP3 polling I need help with.
>> My alpha pager is from a distinct phone number & can have a message of
>> up to 80 characters long (fills up quickly). The computer it will run on is
>> constantly on the Internet through a dedicated connection (in fact runs
>> network monitoring software to send out pages). Since there are multiple
>> employees in the alpha page program (all able to be individually selected
>> with the DDE link) the format will be as such:
>>
>> E-mail address polled: pager@xxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject line: DDE entry for name of person to be paged (and will help stop
>> spam from sending a page)
>> Message body: text to be paged, probably truncated to 80 characters &
>> converted to plain text
>>
>> VB6 is available to me. Even though there may be stand-alone
>> applications that could be done (such as VB sending out the page itself), I
>> want to keep it as planned (mainly for error checking being handled fine as
>> it is). My DDE link program was done in VB3 or 4 I think, and I just have
>> the executable (and original references to do a rewrite) now.
>> TIA,
>> David
>> David@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>>
>
> Well... I'm not sure how much TCP/IP experience you have, so I'll give
> you some general information - and let you ask specific questions as
> needed.
>
> First, you need to decide how your going to interact with the pop3
> server. There are a couple of ways I can think of off the top...
>
> You could use outlook automation to do this, but then of course you are
> then reliant on the presence of outlook. It that isn't a problem for
> you then this may be an easy way to accomplish this - especially if the
> POP3 server uses one of the alternative authentication methods.
>
> You can of course get 3rd party POP3 controls, if you don't like the
> above and you have to do something other then clear text authentication.
> That would eliminate the reliance on outlook, and would most likely let
> you more easily access more secure POP3 accounts.
>
> Or you can use my prefered way... And that is just to use a socket and
> just talk directly to the server. For the majority of pop servers, this
> method will be just fine (actually, all of them would be just fine -
> it's just that most just use a regular plain text login). The pop3
> protocol is fairly simple. Connect to port 110, get a ready response,
> and then start sending/recieving text. You will probably want to look
> at the RFC for available commands and user authentication (there are 2
> common ways to do this - USER/PASS and APOP) APOP is a little more
> complicated because it involves the use of an MD5 hash to compute a
> checksum.
>
> As for the socket communication... There are a number of ways to do
> that as well. I'm not sure which version of VB you have, but I know at
> least Pro had the winsock control available. I can't give you much
> advice on that, since I never used it much :)
>
> You also have the choice of 3rd party socket controls. Again, I can't
> give much advice here, since I didn't really use many. I did use a
> control from Mabry for a few apps, and it worked well - but,
> unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's still available.
>
> And the last way, and my prefered method, is to just use the winsock API
> directly. If you decide to go this way, I do have a file that has a lot
> of the winsock api declared - including wrapper functions for some of
> the common winsock macros and a couple of extra utility functions. I
> would be willing to pass that along if you want it. To bad I never
> finished that winsock typelib :)
>

Oh yeah... The rfc for pop3:

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1939.txt

There are couple of more for extensions, updates etc - but you should be
able to get them from the same site:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/

and to a search for pop3 :)

--
Tom Shelton
.

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