John Walter approached me with the idea of being able to send text messages to a Sprint PCS phone. We had both seen it done via email and/or web page (cgi) scripts. We figured it should be easy to implement.
What John needed was a way for his HP VEE software that controls his ultra cool space simulation chamber to send SYSTEM FAILURE notifications to lab technicians. I figured that a command line utlitiy could be executed from the HP VEE software to accomplish the task.
The project was completed in about 30 minutes on a boring Saturday afternoon between heated games of Worms Armageddon. The resultant app fulfills the basic requirement of sending an email message to a cell phone along with some additional features.
The software uses a configuration file that provides a set of predefined messages. The configuration file also contains settings for the mail server address, the message subject line, and the originating email address. A plain text email message is constructed and sent to the SMTP server. A simple success or failure message is printed on stdout when the program has finished executing. The software should probably be modified to return 1 on success and 0 on failure, but it currently always returns 0.
Although the software is geared toward sending short text messages to a PCS phone, it can really be used to send predefined messages to any email address. Perhaps there are other uses for it in the Windows world...if you find the software useful, please drop me a note.
The entire project has been zipped here for download. The project was developed in Microsoft Developer Studio and the zip file contains all necessary project files. The zip archive contains a compiled executable and a sample ini configuration file.