Great job, croft!

Now, consider if there are ways to automate the entire process even more! Right now, you plan to have a web page where each person, after receiving their kill email, will copy & paste the text into a form and submit it to your parsing script. What if instead, those people could just forward the email to a special account that would be checked by your parse script? This would be easier for people I think than browsing to a page and pasting in the text. At that point, they could even setup an auto-forward rule (if their email client has this feature like Outlook and Outlook Express do). With an auto-forward rule, they would not have to do anything! The kill mail would arrive then be automatically forwarded to your parsing script!

To accomplish this, you'd write a PHP script that uses POP3 to check a mail account that you create specifically for this purpose. The only thing left would be to schedule that script to routinely check the POP3 account. You can do this scheduling a number of ways depending on what access you have to the web server. If you have shell access and cron privs, you could create a cron job that runs your PHP script every 10 minutes or something like that. If you have a webpage that is frequently accessed anyway, you can add code to it that runs your POP3 checking and parsing script whenever people hit it. You have options.

Keep this thread going if you want to develop this further. It's the creative process that I love about programming. It's fun coming up with creative, logical solutions to complex situations.

Using the auto email thingy is not an optimal way to go. Then they have to alt/tab out of the game start up outlook or whatever and mail it to a new adress. Plus you can not forward mail from eve mail client to outlook or any other program.

As it is now they just klick the ingame browser and go to the page post the mail and its done. Faster and easyer. Ofcourse i will add a bit security to it but not untill this is done.

Ah, so "eve" has it's own built in mail system for communicating with players. I was thinking that the game was sending standard email to the players normal email accounts. Gotcha.

Yeah, not sure of any way to automate this further. Again, good work, croft.

Hi,

I too am trying to develop my own EVE kill mail parser, was wondering how this works, not literally how it works but can i see it working?

Cheers

I am curious what a project like this would cost, and who I would contact for this.

A few hundred dollars most likely. You can post programming contract gigs in the IT Water Cooler forum. http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/forum95.html

Interesting stuff.

You could automate it further by screen scraping the mail pages. Just have PHP download the latest mail periodically and do everything in an automated way.

However, this would require that PHP know the passwords of the users it wants to download mail for and also authenticate with the website.