# 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<String> = None;
loop {
match check_for_pizza_status() {
Some(status) => {
if let Some(prev) = ¤t {
if prev != &status {
send_update(&status, &prev);
current = Some(status.to_string());
}
} else {
send_update(&status, "nothing");
current = Some(status.to_string());
}
}
None => {
current = None;
}
}
std::thread::sleep(std::time::Duration::from_secs(1));
}
}
/// Fake web scraping
fn check_for_pizza_status() -> Option<&'static str> {
let old = STATUS.fetch_add(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 send_update(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
.send_to(
&dest,
&format!(
"šššššššš\nPizza Update: {} -> {}\nšššššššš\n===========\n",
old, new
),
)
.expect("failed to send notification");
}
```
# Some Details
The email portion is built on top of [`lettre`](https://crates.io/crates/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