Community challenge: Automated PBEM e-mailing

[lch]

Not to curb the enthusiasm, but here is another worthwhile suggestion: Why not just have a web interface which offers a file upload? This is what I'd offer players on my servers, if for some inexplicable reason (firewall) they wouldn't be able to use the game network interface anymore.

Pro's:
- regardless of operating system, everybody has a web browser
- no binary needs to get executed by the players (security concern)
- instead of complicated POP/SMTP code, all it takes is overwriting the game files on the server (after checking)
- clients don't need to update their software, as all the code is on the server

Con's:
- no persistant storage of configuration (savegames location), although one could use cookies for that
- hmmm...
- makes the need to use email as transport medium for those PBEM games unnecessary?

[llamabeast]

The thought had crossed my mind. But basically that would be about as hard as using a webmail interface, and significantly more annoying than using something like Thunderbird or Outlook, so I don't really see that it would be an advantage.

Zeldor's idea of an app which simply directly connects to the server is reasonable, but how to do it (and do it securely) is completely out of my area of knowledge, and frankly isn't something I'm especially likely to do. Also I foresee firewall problems if I end up inside a university network again (the same issue applies to a web interface as well).

The ultimate thing I could do would make the LlamaServer pretend to be a dominions network server. But also very unlikely - the amount of work required would definitely not be justified by the return on time saved by users.

I'm really excited by Baalz's script - thanks Baalz! It sounds quite excellent - quite a significant timesaver. I'll take a look at it as soon as I get round to booting in Windows, and maybe it will inspire me to knock up something similar for Linux. We should also post in the MP forum so people actually find it.

[Baalz]

Feel free to put it with the llamaserver instructions as it's set up as is to mail there.