[aprssig] APRS<=>E-mail

[Kurt Kochendarfer]

I'd love to hazard a guess, but my work schedule makes this more of a
weekend project than anything.  I'd really like to get the E-mail=>APRS
part of it completed by the end of the month.  I've got a few wickets to
work out with string handling to split e-mails longer than one APRS
message, but that's the last hurdle to get over.

I'd also planned outgoing E-mail functionality similar to a combo of
Pete's EMAIL-2 engine and APRSLink.  I like Pete's "alias" functionality
a lot and planned on incorporating similar functionality in my engine.
The difference in my plan from existing outgoing APRS=>E-mail engines
was to write the mail header Reply-To so that when a person gets an
e-mail sent by you from APRS, the could hit "Reply" in their e-mail
client and the return mail would be sent back to the account which you
set up for E-mail=>APRS use in the first place.

In addition, I was planning on adding multi-message=>one e-mail
functionality similar to APRSLink.  Both of these can be worked on
later.  To me, the foremost "want" was to be able to get mail piped from
my GMail account to APRS.

I'll post updates to the sig as they happen.  Stay tuned.

Kurt
KE7KUS

> Sounds very interesting Kurt - would love to see this!
> 
> Guestimation on when it may be available?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Tate, KA7O
> 
> Kurt Kochendarfer wrote:
> > I know it's not the "Universal" e-mail<=>APRS system that would be
> ideal
> > for Universal Text Messaging, but I am about 75% complete with
> writing
> > an e-mail<=>APRS engine that individual hams could download and
> setup on
> > a computer and would move e-mail from one e-mail account they
> designate
> > to one APRS Call/SSID and vice versa.  Not universal, but it does
> bring
> > the functionality to those hams who want it and don't mind doing a
> > little legwork to get it set up. 
> > 
> > I already use GMail, so I set up the engine to move mail from my
> GMail
> > account, which leaves the spam filtering to the Google side of
> things.
> > I set up a dedicated GMail account just for this purpose, so I can
> set
> > up my own strict list of filters, whitelist members, etc.  The
> engine
> > strips HTML out of incoming mail, but that's about all the
> processing I
> > saw a need for, since Google's spam filters seem to work so well.
> > 
> > Kurt
> > KE7KUS