DeeKnow’s Grotto

Radio Community Server (RCS) was officially released today. RCS "is a software application for Radio UserLand or Frontier/Manila that makes it possible for individuals or organizations to host communities of Radio users. It offers all of the community functionality currently offered by UserLand's centralized system".  One interesting about-face is the decision to offer RCS free to licensed users of Frontier (which we are).

4:07:17 PM  

Blogging via SMTP in Radio is possible by configuring Radio to connect to a specific POP account/server and look for message that contain a certain subject line.  These messages will then be deleted off the server and rendered into the website.

But what if...

• you dont want them deleted
• or your using an Exchange server and may not want (or be able) to use POP to interact with it
• or you want to do some other processing or attribute checking of the message (e.g. maximum size, specific receipients only, removal of HTML, Spam detection, attachment handling, en/decryption etc.)
• or you want your mail client to do some filtering of its own (e.g. moving messages to subfolder based on attributes)

Then you could modify the Frontier script in Radio (if you know how, and I don't, but Steve Hooker does), or you might write your own mail client/tool, query the store directly and write the messages to an #upstream enabled folder in the local Radio file-system and then let Radio render the files next time it checks for recently updates.

As I'm a total Frontier-verb-weenie, I thought I'd do this in Perl,  and it turns out after a few Web and Usenet searches that the Win32::OLE module is ideal in that you can make a connection to the local Exchange client vie OLE and make queries through it to the exchange server message store. (obviously this needs to run on a windows client)

I knocked out a script yesterday that is based largely on one that Aaron Ibrahim included in a post to comp.lang.perl.misc last month.  It creates a MAPI session, logs in using my local profile name,  checks for presence of an Inbox folder,  then a subfolder named Blog and extracts any messages found there into external TXT files within a upstream enabled Radio folder in the local file-system.

See --> /team/tech/perl/exchange/mail_fetch.pl

Have taken a screenshot of a sample rendering and knocked out a diagram showing the flow of the messages/application. Plus I kept some notes on MAPI from what I found during my Web/Usenet search.

This is all asynchonous of course, the client needs to poll the message store and check for new messages.  Another more synchronous method (wiring into Outlook in this case) would be to write a custom handler that could be launched from an inbox rule trigger, take an exchage messageID (which launcher.dll can pass) and fetch the new message.

8:36:20 AM