The Mail Client IAP

This document describes the specifics of the Mail Client IAP. For a general description of an IAP, refer iap.html.

The Mail-Client IAP is a client-only IAP. That is, it makes only out-going calls. This IAP is intended for the followin purpose: when a user receives an email or an instant message, the Mail-Client IAP is activated, and it places an outgoing call. The outgoing call is for the recipient of the email. If that user's preference indicates that the particular message should be redirected (in addition to original delivery) to another end-point, the call establishment succeeds.

The specifics of the mail-client IAP are:

• The IAP was originally written to work with an old version of the APC service. The portions of the code relevant to this are under a (#ifdef OLD_APC). These are not included by default since the old APC package is not part of the release.
• The scenario of operation is as follows: a program part of a mail system or an instant message system calls this IAP giving it the message that was received for a user. The IAP then tries to establish a call using the call agent. The call succeeds only if the user wanted that email or instant message to be read out on her preferred end-point.
• The Msg2VoiceIF interface is implemented by the IAP for receiving the email or any test message.
• Note: -- a lot of the code to do preference registry lookup and so on is irrelevant when operating with a call agent since the CA performs all that functionality.
• The calls from the APC are all dummy since there is no 'end' operator.
• The IAP also implements the RMIConnectorReaderIF -- this is the interface used by the first operator in the data transformation path to read the input data.
• On receiving a message through the Msg2VoiceIF, the IAP stores it in a hashtable and establishes a session. The message is passed as data to the APC path through the RMIConnectorReaderIF. The entry in the hashtable is cleared when the session is terminated.

The files

• Msg2Voice.jc -- the main file implementing Msg2VoiceIF, RMIConnectorReaderIF, IAPIF, and ConnectorMgrIF.
• SendGSMEntity.jc, Mail_Cl.jc -- relevant only when operating with the old APC.
• Msg2VoiceIF.java -- the interface using which the mail or instant message service posts text data to the IAP.
• MailService.java -- example client of the Msg2VoiceIF.

The Msg2VoiceIF interface

The interface consists of a single routine to post data. The parameters given are: the data itself, the sender identity, the recipient identity, and the message-id. The data is the body of the message. The sender and recipient identities are the "uid" portions of the Iceberg unique id (see the Naming Service documentation for more details). The message-id is a string that uniquely identifies the message (could be pulled from the "Message-Id" field of the email header).

Running the IAP and the MailService program

To run the IAP, add the following line to the iSpace configuration file:

iceberg.iap.mail_cl.Msg2Voice simja-host name-server ipop-host[:port]

The simja-host is the machine running the old APC service and is not relevant for operation in the current release. The name-server is not relevant for operation with a call-agent. Both these arguments can be dummy strings. The ipop-host is the location of the machine where the iPOP is running, and port is the iSpace port of the iPOP (defaults to 1099).

The usage of the MailService program is as follows:

iceberg.iap.mail_cl.MailService mail-file Msg2Voice-IAP-URL from-user to-user msg-id

The mail-file is the name of the file that contains the body of the message. If it is given as "-", then STDIN is read instead of a file. The IAP URL is of the form: hostname:port/className. The hostname is the machine on which the Mail-Client IAP is running. The port is the iSpace port on the machine (can be left out if default is to be used). The className is the name of the class that represents the IAP (mail_cl.Msg2Voice).

It is a little tricky to invoke this program for regular email. I could'nt just add a pipe command to my .forward since then the program would run on the mail server (not necessarily a desirable thing in a shared mail server). I had to create an alias on my local desktop machine (to which I had root access) -- in /etc/aliases. The only purpose of the alias was to invoke this program. I then forwarded (after retaining a copy) my mails to this alias.

Further, I had to wrap the java program inside a wrapper that set the appropriate classpath environment variables and extracted the "From:" and "To:" fields, and the "Message-id:" field and the body of the email. (This wrapper is not yet complete -- an old version is in mail_wrapper.C).