SPAM!

This week's task was to add two new features to the DueDates project. Email and Wakeup. As easy as Dr. Johnson made it sound, it was slightly more difficult. But because it was so "simple", we decided to split up the tasks this week. I was responsible for Email. Both of us finished our tasks.

SPAM anyone!?

First off, we are using JavaMail to implement the email feature in this release.

Email is dependent on the user's ISP smtp server. I never knew that until Arthur Shum pointed that out. Thank you for that. I am still surprised that anyone can send email without any form of authentication. Don't look now, but open opportunity for one of my favorite can goods, SPAM! I don't know if I should be mentioning this, but this is quite dangerous. Users can actually spam people if they input someone else's email and a very small wakeup interval.

Dang Hawaiian Telcome, Being Safe and All.

I couldn't quite seem to get it to work with Hawaiian Telcom's server. I googled the error message I received. All sites indicated that it just needs authentication. Unfortunately, I don't have the master account information (or any login for that matter) so I couldn't get any further. But I did discuss it with my partner John Zhou and another classmate. They confirmed my code worked with RoadRunner's SMTP server w/o authentication. Since I couldn't test my system at home, I drove down and did some hacking at Hamilton Library as well.

Bigger Problems?

Because there are so many possible ISPs, the big variance can severely affect performance guarantee. Currently if someone is using Hawaiian Telcom's service, then it is very likely they won't be able to use the -email feature. I've been trying to find a way to check if the provided smtp server requires authentication, and if it does, then prompt user for the fields. No luck yet. Will work on it some more later.

Group Meetings

We met a couple of times this week for about 30 minutes each. We were mainly checking up on the progress of each other, and answering each other's question on installation issues with JavaMail. Otherwise, we worked quite independently. It was still kind of neat how everything worked without each other's source code as they should since they're not dependent on each other.

Improvements and Summary:

In regards to predictability, this version was harder. This was slightly harder for me to implement only because Hawaiian Telcom's SMTP server was not working for me. Once I got to UH, it was working just fine. I am concerned for unknown ISP's though.

This was really my first time I actually posted a question to the ICS group. It was very helpful. I'd probably ask more questions rather than wreck my brain over things. Maybe even try StackOverflow too.