Challenge! A LabVIEW email GUI for elderly person

[grahamwebb]

My elderly neighbour has recently been set up with a tiny laptop (running win7 starter) and a hotmail account to keep in touch with her relatives. She is in her late 80's and has never used a computer before. She can drive a tractor and shoot moles but never manages to navigate through hotmail to her inbox. (the tiny inbox text is lost in a sea of adverts and junk).

The obvious solution is a LabVIEW front end! Something that looks like this http://pawpawmail.com/learn/ but uses a free email server.

I have very little time to produce something, so has anyone driven a web-based email server using LabVIEW before? Can anyone start the ball rolling with some code here? All her relatives live hundreds of miles away, so any help would make a wonderful change to her life. 

Many Thanks 

[tst]

You can certainly use LV to write a mail client (and there are probably some examples available online or even shipping with the Internet toolkit). Keep in mind, though, that you would probably have to manage caching the messages, contacts, etc., so it might not be worth the effort.

Instead, you could try some other options:

• Use Firefox with Adblock. You can probably use that to filter all the junk and display the text using a large font.
• Check the accessibility features in Windows to see how much you can control the font size.
• Use an existing program (Outlook? Outlook Express?) to connect to the account.
• Search Google for "email accessibility" or "hotmail accessibility" and see if you turn up something.

[Intaris · Accepted solution]

What about http://www.eldy.eu/

If it doesn't work with Hotmail it's probably a LOT easier to simply organise a cheap POP-capable email account than to write your own email program (As fascinating as that might be).

[Dominic.Walker]

I'm pretty sure Hotmail doesn't support POP3 or SMTP.  (Accounts registered a long time ago do, but I think this was stopped a few years back).  If it did, that would be fine to do.  As such it can't really be used unless you load the web page and then skim it for information in the background, displaying the relevant stuff on the front page.  That would take a lot of array manipulation to detect the email titles etc, but could be done.  You'd also have to work out how to fill in the forms on web pages for sending emails and logging in etc automatically.  I'm not really sure if that is even possible within LabVIEW.

[smercurio_fc]

I would tend to agree that doing this in LabVIEW is probably not a good approach to take. There are many email clients available, so a better solution is to use an email client rather than the web-based access. Hotmail, by the way, does support POP3, at least according to this: http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!32413.entry?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=320043977. 

Another solution is to use a different browser. If the issue is that there's all those ads, then stop using IE and use Firefox with the AdBlock Plus extension. It's amazing how much "lighter" web pages look once you strip out all the ads.

[grahamwebb]

I can't believe I've found something LaVIEW can't do! I never thought I'd see the day 😉

Thank you all the comments. Perhaps in the future LabVIEW there will be an NI toolbars for windows and the web browsers. In the mean time I tried Eldy and it looks very good, I'll set her up with it over the weekend and see how she gets on.

[smercurio_fc]

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@grahamwebb wrote:

I can't believe I've found something LaVIEW can't do! I never thought I'd see the day 😉

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Nobody ever said LabVIEW couldn't do this. It could certainly be done, but it's not very practical, as other solutions are better in this case. One must learn when to use a hammer instead of a screwdriver to drive that nail in. 

[grahamwebb]

hmm.. I thought LabVIEW was a powertool! If it can be done, that's the only reason I need to use LabVIEW. Bending space and time I'll leave for 'other solutions'.

[Intaris]

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@smercurio_fc wrote:

Nobody ever said LabVIEW couldn't do this. It could certainly be done, but it's not very practical, as other solutions are better in this case. One must learn when to use a hammer instead of a screwdriver to drive that nail in. 

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What are these "hammer" things people keep going on about??? 

[smercurio_fc]

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@Intaris wrote:

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@smercurio_fc wrote:

Nobody ever said LabVIEW couldn't do this. It could certainly be done, but it's not very practical, as other solutions are better in this case. One must learn when to use a hammer instead of a screwdriver to drive that nail in. 

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What are these "hammer" things people keep going on about??? 

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I don't know - I just use my forehead.