EmailPager

Inspiration

We wanted to explore how a computer and phone can interact without conventional methods. After much brainstorming, we settled on text to email communication.

What it does

We imagine our program running on a server (though we have to run it from a computer) and running in the background on your email at all times. In a real application it would check every minute or so (for demo purposes we'll have it run much faster), whether you have received an email from your phone number. When it finds your phone number it will parse through the message, looking for commands which it will recognize. We have implemented a way in which you can set the program to look through your emails for keywords which you can select by texting set "keyword" to your email, and then remove keywords with delete "keyword". When the program finds the keyword in the subject, address, or body of any email you have. It will alert you with a text message.

How I built it

We built our program in Python, using Regex and email packages.

Challenges I ran into

Using the email package was a big problem because we ran in to a lot of typing issues along the way and everything was so high level it took a long time to understand exactly what our code was doing in just reading/writing emails and texts.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think we are most proud of sticking with our project even when it seemed difficult. Especially at the start when we were getting nowhere just trying to figure out how to read emails, because as soon as we had that functionality we knew that we just got so excited at the possibilities we had unlocked.

What I learned

How to use email and texting libraries in python and parsing with regular expressions.

What's next for EmailPager

We see a lot of possibilities for the ability to manage your web services using texting, especially in the application of managing your web applications when