Service: custom software development
Solution type: mobile application
Business area: internet
Customer: 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 the portable devices, the company first collects all customers' e-mails to the company's 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, which did not open its protocol to the public. As for the web-based mail systems, it was challenging to extract the essential information from the HTML pages. This problem was offered to the Arcadia, Inc. team known for its highly qualified professionals.
Solution
The Arcadia, Inc. 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 describes 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, Inc. professionals developed pollers that parse HTML pages to identify and extract the needed information. Pollers use this information to retrieve and deliver messages to the company server. Periodic changes in the web design add complexity for identifying the essential information in 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