Ping system using email

[hkfouie]

Hi,

I am currently writing a monitoring system for a few systems in our lab. I can currently command the system to send all the important data to a specified email address however I would like to do this remotely. 

Is it possible to set it up so I can email the vi with a set phrase, this would cause the vi to reply with the relevent data to the same address? 

The main purpose of this is so it can be easily accessed on a smart phone so vpn type solutions are not viable, i just want access to a specific array.

Thanks

[smercurio_fc]

Is it possible? Yes. Is it practical? Probably not, since you'd need to run some sort of POP client in order to fetch the email from somewhere. Emails are not sent client to client. They are sent account to account. And these accounts are stored on an email server somewhere. Your computer runs an email client that contacts the server and downloads the email.

In terms of an alternative, you'd need to provide more information about your network setup. Do you have a firewall? Can you set up web publishing of your VI (refer to the LabVIEW Help on how to do this, as well as the articles in the NI KnowledgeBase).

[hkfouie]

I have looked into web publishing and will probably set this up as well, but I wanted a (simple once set up) method to get vital information sent to a phone on demand. 

We do have a firewall on our network however it is open to have certain ip addresses opened up for access. If this isnt going to be practical I will just publish the array of data i want to be able to access remotely as the ability to 'ping via email' probably isnt worth the headache.

[RTSLVU]

You could do this in a roundabout sort of way if you are using Outlook as your email client.

Make a seperate Labview program to grab the data and email it.

Set up a rule in Outlook that looks for certain key words in the subject like "Send Data Now" and set "Start Application" as the action to perform and have it launch the seperate LabView program to grab the data and email it.

Then all you need to do is send an email to your account with the proper subject line and Outlook should do the rest.

For multipule machines make a slightly different rule on each machine like subject contains "Send Data Now Unit 1" for one system and use "Send Data Now Unit 2" for the next one, and so on...

That way you only need one email account.

[smercurio_fc · Accepted solution]

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@hkfouie wrote:

I have looked into web publishing and will probably set this up as well, but I wanted a (simple once set up) method to get vital information sent to a phone on demand.

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You could also create a web service. See the section on the NI site for other ideas: http://www.ni.com/mobile/