A private USA-based company offers 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.
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 does 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.
Arcadia, Inc.
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 deliveres 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.
Employed technologies: Solaris,
C++, sockets, TCP/IP spying tools; for web-based
e-mail services pollers: Perl, HTTP. Duration: 6 months or 15 person/months.
Location of work: development -
St. Petersburg, Russia, implementation -
on site.
