cheap_alerts

A utility for sending text alerts via email

Basic Idea

All US cellular providers allow someone to send and recieve sms messages via email. Leveraging this, you could send "push-like" alerts out, if you have access to an email server.

An Example

Let's say your phone number is (612)-555-0111 and your carrier is Verizon, your number would have an email address of 6125550111@vtext.com.

Let's also say you want to send yourself an alert when your pizza order changes status at your favorite local pizza place. You could build yourself a little web scraper that would keep track of your current orders and when the status changed you could send the updated status to your phone by emailing the above.

```rust use cheap_alerts::{Carrier, Destination, Sender}; use std::sync::atomic::{AtomicU8, Ordering};

static STATUS: AtomicU8 = AtomicU8::new(0);

fn main() { let mut current: Option = None; loop { match checkforpizzastatus() { Some(status) => { if let Some(prev) = &current { if prev != &status { sendupdate(&status, &prev); current = Some(status.tostring()); } } else { sendupdate(&status, "nothing"); current = Some(status.tostring()); } } None => { current = None; } } std::thread::sleep(std::time::Duration::fromsecs(1)); } } /// Fake web scraping fn checkforpizzastatus() -> Option<&'static str> { let old = STATUS.fetchadd(1, Ordering::Relaxed); if old > 4 { STATUS.store(0, Ordering::Relaxed); None } else { determine_status(&STATUS) } }

fn determine_status(val: &AtomicU8) -> Option<&'static str> { match val.load(Ordering::Relaxed) { 1 => Some("Pending"), 2 => Some("Cooking"), 3 => Some("On the way"), 4 => Some("Complete"), _ => None, } }

fn sendupdate(new: &str, old: &str) { let mut sender = Sender::builder() .address("junk@example.com") .stdout() .expect("failed to create sender"); let dest = Destination::new("6125550111", &Carrier::Verizon); sender .sendto( &dest, &format!( "🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕\nPizza Update: {} -> {}\n🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕\n===========\n", old, new ), ) .expect("failed to send notification"); }

```

Some Details

The email portion is built on top of lettre and there are 3 options for the sender

• File: This takes a file path and will write the email to a file on the file system as json using the message ID (the RFC 2822 time stamp) as the file name
• Sendmail: This uses the sendmail cli tool for sending an email
• SMTP: This uses the Simple Mail Transport Protocol there are 3 methods for this
  • Unencrypted Localhost, this is by far the simplest, but least secure
  • Simple, this you provide a domain (as an &str) and it will use TLS to send the message
  • Full, this