HCA receiving email as a trigger...

[GHTNY2011]

Greetings all -

My disclaimer and intro - I am an HCA-newbie. I've recently decided to consider migrating from our current dev environment (INDIGO) to another (HCA, UDI's
ISY-99i, or a combination of the two).

One feature within INDIGO that (appears) to be missing in HCA is the ability to receive emails that can then be used as triggers. Email notifications are great and I leverage them extensively, however, I also have the requirement to be able to receive emails that I then use to trigger scenes and / or individual programs.

As an example, incoming email to HCA would be checked for keywords in the SUBJ and body of the email. If there is a match, receipt of that email triggers (whatever).

ie: email subject = COMMAND
email body = ARM HOUSE
resulting action: enable all perimeter door trigserLINC's.

ie: email subject = STATUS
email body = GLOBAL STATUS
resulting action: poll all Insteon devices on the network and send an email alert
with the results.

The argument against facilitating received emails to be evaluated as triggers is based on the proliferation of smart-phones with their on-line interfaces. Despite this, there still remain sound-cases where an email trigger is desireable (I am out of cell-phone coverage, but am able to send an email from my two-way pager, or - I want to use an automated script that resides outside of HCA that sends email trigger-requests to HCA).

I realize HCA currently has no facility (none that I can find anyways) for polling an email account - only one for SMTP-outbound notifications.

Has anyone out there crafted a work-around? I know I'm not the only person who seeks this functionality as it is built-in to INDIGO, and there is also a 3rd party developed script from HOMESEER that does the same thing.

The main attraction of HCA to me is it's rich program feature-set (of which quite a bit is lacking in INDIGO) along with the object-oriented interface (very nice)!

Any thoughts / suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

My thanks in advance -
Brian

[KHarms]

This is one area that have been thought of from time to time but we haven't moved on it since we didn't have a concrete idea on how it would be used. Can you say a bit more about how you would use it. Please be specific to your application.

[GHTNY2011]

Sure!
My group is a rag-tag team of hobbiest engineers functioning collectively as a group of integrators for high-end residential and light-commercial customers. One solution we offer to customers as a stop-gap solution to investing in a commerically managed (monitored) home alarm solution is to install Insteon triggerLINC's and motion detectors at a client's site.

Use-case scenario, the client leaves their residence and forgets to "arm" (enable the triggerLINC's on perimeter doors) via a KeypadLINC (say, that triggers a scene we'll call "ARM") located next to the front door (interior) of their house. They can then simply send an email from their Blackberry (or whatever) to a dedicated email acount that HCA would routinely poll, say, every 10 minutes. The content of the subject and body of that email would then be checked by HCA for trigger words (ie 'ARM") by a program checking for such keywords on an in-bound email. The program on the HCA would then simply use IF-THEN-ELSE logic to trigger the "ARM" scene that would have otherwise been triggered by a KeypadLINC.

POP as a mechanism for HCA to poll incoming email would be fine, although IMAP would be desireable. The example I've given here is one we've had running successfully for the past year
in INDIGO. We really don't want to stick with INDIGO - but my point in mentioning this is that there were no noticable performance issues whatsoever in running this scenario. We run INDIGO on a bare-bones MAC Mini...

Does this help?

I can provide detailed additional examples if you'd like!

Cheers -
Brian

[mjl]

Sure!
My group is a rag-tag team of hobbiest engineers functioning collectively as a group of integrators for high-end residential and light-commercial customers. One solution we offer to customers as a stop-gap solution to investing in a commerically managed (monitored) home alarm solution is to install Insteon triggerLINC's and motion detectors at a client's site.

Use-case scenario, the client leaves their residence and forgets to "arm" (enable the triggerLINC's on perimeter doors) via a KeypadLINC (say, that triggers a scene we'll call "ARM") located next to the front door (interior) of their house. They can then simply send an email from their Blackberry (or whatever) to a dedicated email acount that HCA would routinely poll, say, every 10 minutes. The content of the subject and body of that email would then be checked by HCA for trigger words (ie 'ARM") by a program checking for such keywords on an in-bound email. The program on the HCA would then simply use IF-THEN-ELSE logic to trigger the "ARM" scene that would have otherwise been triggered by a KeypadLINC.

POP as a mechanism for HCA to poll incoming email would be fine, although IMAP would be desireable. The example I've given here is one we've had running successfully for the past year
in INDIGO. We really don't want to stick with INDIGO - but my point in mentioning this is that there were no noticable performance issues whatsoever in running this scenario. We run INDIGO on a bare-bones MAC Mini...

Does this help?

I can provide detailed additional examples if you'd like!

Cheers -
Brian
We used to use scripts to send e-mail before HCA had the e-mail technology built in. I don't see why you couldn't write a script that would read email. The script would probably have to set HCA flags based on the e-mail subject. Visual Programs in HCA can be set to trigger on flag changes, or you could poll the flags. Scripting to read e-mail is not something I've ever done, but I get a bunch of links when I google "vbscript to read email".

[Morkai]

Not that the email control option wouldn't add more versatility, but couldn't you normally accomplish the same thing via the smartphone app or web? As your example above, just connect and activate the desired keypad button.

[mjl]

Not that the email control option wouldn't add more versatility, but couldn't you normally accomplish the same thing via the smartphone app or web? As your example above, just connect and activate the desired keypad button.
Yes but that would not be automated. An e-mail trigger can be automated from any other app that can send e-mail.