Service: custom software development
Solution type: mobile application
Business area: internet
Client: A private USA-based company offering innovative acoustic modem technology for mobile Internet access over wireless and cable network. The company produces portable devices for receiving and sending e-mail via any phone.
Period: 2002
Key problems
To facilitate e-mail access via portable devices, the company collected all customers' e-mails to the company server. Special programs (pollers) were developed to retrieve customers' e-mails from different mail systems and deliver them to the server. The main problem was to create a poller for the AOL mail system because AOL did not open its protocol to the public. Another challenging task was retrieving information from web-based mail systems: that required extracting essential information from HTML pages; besides, design of the pages was subject to changes from time to time.
Solution
Arcadia's researchers had to treat the AOL server and the AOL client application as black boxes and to reverse engineer the original protocol. By observing the client-server interaction in different situations, the developers created a model that adequately described this interaction. Based on this model, the poller can emulate the standard AOL mail client application. This poller retrieves mails from AOL and delivers them to the company server.
For web-based mail systems, Arcadia's software engineers developed pollers that parsed HTML pages, identified/extracted all the needed information and delivered messages to the company server. The algorithm of identifying essential information was developed taking into account possible changes in the web design of the parsed pages.
Technologies used
- Solaris
- C
- sockets
- TCP/IP spying tools
- for web-based e-mail services pollers: Perl, HTTP
Duration and scope
6 months / ~15 person-months