Email 0810
Contents
Overview of Functionality
LinuxMCE has the ability to email voicemails left at your home directly to you. In addition to that functionality, LinuxMCE can also fire out emails whenever a specified event occurs in your home. If your cellular provider has an email to SMS gateway in place, you can utilize it to receive notifications from LinuxMCE in the form of text messages.
DEVELOPMENT NOTE: This feature was implemented in a generic way because many ISP's are now blocking the required ports to prevent users from running their own dedicated mail server.
Email Setup
The web admin provides a quick start method to configure your email account from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo. Other provider specific settings can be specified if your email provider is not already supported.
The email account configured in the Email Setup portion of the web admin is the email address that LinuxMCE will use to send emails from the home. This can be the same as any users email address, but does not have to be.
Simply navigate to the web admin at Http://192.168.80.1/lmce-admin/ and click on Email Setup. Choose your provider from the dropdown, enter your account information and click Update.
Users Email Addresses
Currently the only functionality gained by adding the individual user's email addresses is that when a voicemail is received, it will be transcribed to text and emailed directly to the user. The above email setup portion of configuration must be complete before individual users email will function.
Once the main email account has been setup, you can enter your individual users email addresses. Simply go to the Users section of the web admin and enter the email addresses and click Save
Sending Emails on Events
The beauty of LinuxMCE is in its sheer power, you can set the system up to send you an email based on any event that happens in the home. This can be something as simple as an alarm mode change, sensor getting tripped, or when video is being watched.
To setup LinuxMCE to send emails based on events simply go to the web admin and select Respond to Events. Then you will enter a description for the Scenario we will be creating, selecting the event you want to trigger the email, and clicking Add.
Now simply fill out the relevant information regarding the event you chose from the previous step and click Update. Then select the General Info Plugin from the Device dropdown menu with the Send Email command and click Add. Now all you have to do is fill out the information to be sent in the email and click Save.
NOTE: You can use a comma-delimited list of addresses to send the same message to.
Conclusion
Given the limitations and trends of ISP's making this sort of functionality somewhat difficult to implement the features work quite well and LinuxMCE provides and excellent foundation for different methods of notification.
The Send Email command could be made a bit nicer with an additional device data field for a list of users that would lookup the LinuxMCE user's email address to send to without having to input the actual email address.
