I bought a RIM 850 in late 1999 so that I could remain connected to my email even when I was out of the office. Although my service provider Skytel thinks of the RIM as a two-way pager, I think of it as a wireless email appliance. In that role, it has performed flawlessly. I simply have a copy of all incoming email forwarded to my 123456@skytel.com email address, and now I no longer wonder what urgent email messages are piling up "back at the office."
It seemed a shame that my wireless connectivity could only be applied to email; I wanted access to the web as well. Although today's cell phone's are WAP enabled, my RIM was not. Furthermore, the underlying pager network's latency was such that any kind of http-style request/response browsing would be intolerably slow. Finally, in keeping with my notion of "wireless appliance," I didn't want a cumbersome, general purpose browsing capability. Instead, I envisioned a set of web-powered services that would be much easier to use. My solution: rim@lisbonne.com.
If I send email to rim@lisbonne.com, with my request on the subject line, a program processes the request, and sends an email reply with the result. For example, to get a stock quote for IBM, I send an email to rim@lisbonne.com with "quote IBM" as the subject. In a few minutes I get an email back with IBM's current stock price.
Behind the scenes, a procmail filter at lisbonne.com routes all email for rim@lisbonne.com to a perl script I wrote called rim.pl. It parses the subject line, fetches the desired information (usually by screen scraping web pages), and emails back the results. This approach's flexibility made it simple for me to implement the follwing commands:
| quote ticker1, ticker2, ... | returns stock market quotes for each stock ticker. |
| news | returns the top news stories. |
| news phrase | returns news stories which include phrase. |
| biz | returns the top business stories. |
| sports | returns the top sports stories. |
| tech | returns the top technology stories. |
| science | returns the top science stories. |
| weather city, state | returns a weather forecast for city, state. Please note that a comma must separate the city and state. |
| fetch URL | returns the text-only web page at URL. |
| webster word | returns the definition for word. |
| roget word | returns synonyms for word. |
| word | returns the word of the day. |
| history | returns what happened in history on this date. |
| top10 | returns last night's David Letterman Top 10 list. |
| stars | returns today's astronomical highlights. |
| slashdot | returns the current headlines from slashdot.org. |
| slashdot number | returns story number from slashdot.org. |
| unix | returns a UNIX tip of the day. |
| man name | returns the UNIX man page for name. |
| poem | returns the poem of the day. |
| help | returns a list of all commands. |
RIM and other wireless PDA users should feel free to use rim.pl. Since it automtically replies to the originating email address, no set up or registration is necessary. If you forget the commands, simply email "help" to rim@lisbonne.com. Developers should feel free to use, copy, or modify this script. I use it on Linux, but can't vouch for it on any "lesser" operating systems. Please send bug reports, modifications, or feature requests to bob@lisbonne.com.