[Popcon-developers] Popularity contest using something != e-mail?

[Anders Berglund]

Hi,

I'm a satisified Debian user, and I would have liked to be able to help
out somewhat by letting pop-con report what packages I use.
Unfortunately my ISP (sensibly!) blocks outbound SMTP-connections, and
thus I can't let pop-con report my package-usage.
 Would adding some other method of reporting usage be possible? Something
along the lines of writing the e-mail message to a file with a "unique"
name along the lines of <YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS>.<RANDOM-STRING> and then
just uploading it to your pop-con server?

The client could just redirect the e-mail message to a file, and then call
some external program that uploads it. With wget and --post-file it could
use HTML, otherwise it's easy to use FTP with one of the very many
ftp-clients available...
 On the server side it would just be a matter of periodically scanning the
upload directory for files and just sending the files as e-mail to the
local SMTP-deamon, something that shouldn't be too computationally
expensive (and it could be written in an hour or so using perl...).

It shouldn't be too demanding, or? With programs like
wget/<random-web-server>/<random-ftp-server>/<random-ftp-client>/perl it
wouldn't take more custom coding than redirecting the report on the client
side and writing a script on the server that scans the upload directory
and passes the incoming files on to the SMTP-server as e-mails.


In these days I guess more and more ISP:s either blocks all SMTP-traffic
or require that you use an SMTP-relay (which I can't as I live in a dorm
where no such relay is available...), and thus many people wanting to help
out are unable to do so.


It's an idea, at least :-).


Regards,

Anders Berglund