From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2010-09-27T02:48:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem connecting to hotmail using the pony gem (now using hotmailer)

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On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 3:09 AM, Jen <fluffy_bunny_1988@hotmail.co.uk>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I found the 'hotmailer' gem, but when I try to use it I get an error saying
> the "login" method is unknown. I've looked at the gem code and it looks like
> I'm calling the correct method. Can someone please tell me what I'm doing
> wrong :(
>
> Here is the code I used to test the gem:
>
>    require "rubygems"
>    require "hotmailer"
>    #create object and login
>    jen = Hotmailer.new("my_email_address@hotmail.co.uk","my_password")
>    puts jen.inspect
>    jen.login()
>
> Here is the error I receive:
>
>    /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/hotmailer-1.0.1/lib/hotmailer.rb:24:in `login':
> undefined method `login=' for     nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
>        from hotmailertest.rb:6
>
> The README for the hotmailer gem is located here:
>
>  http://rubydoc.info/gems/hotmailer/1.0.1/frames
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
> Jen.
>
>
> On 08/09/10 18:47, Alex Stahl wrote:
>
>> Hi Jen - Not too long ago I was involved w/ some code to do exactly this
>> - connect to hotmail.  Can't say that I know the solution that my
>> colleague developed before he left, but I do know that hotmail uses a
>> fair amount of ajax (or whatever M$ calls it).  That implies that it's
>> not as simple as sending an http request - there's some processing on
>> the login page that needs to happen first.
>>
>> My next step in inheriting the work is to try to figure out how to parse
>> the javascript from ruby to send the proper request.  Looking at either
>> the harmony or rkelly gems to do so.  They might be suitable for what
>> you're trying as well.
>>
>> -Alex
>>
>> On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 23:46 -0500, Jen wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I have only just started seariously playing with Ruby.
>>> I have a script that needs to e-mail data it has gathered to a specific
>>> address. I want to use my hotmail account to send out the e-mail until I
>>> sort my own mail server, but can't connect using pony.
>>>
>>> my code is:
>>>
>>>      Pony.mail(:to =>  "Myaddress@hotmail.co.uk", :from =>
>>> "Myaddress@hotmail.co.uk", :via =>  :smtp,
>>> :smtp =>  {:host =>  "smtp.live.com", :port =>  "25", :tls =>  true,
>>> :user
>>> =>  "fMyUserName",
>>> :password =>  "MyPassword", :auth =>  :plain,
>>> #:login, :cram_md5,
>>> :domain =>  "localhost:chicken"}, :subject =>  "Optelec tweets", :body =>
>>> "This is a test")
>>>
>>> I am trying to send the email to myself to check if I can receive it.
>>> Does it matter that the 'from' and 'to' addresses are the same.
>>> When I run this (with the correct username and password) the connection
>>> times out.
>>> Uncommenting the commented line above gives errors when running, and I
>>> think this line is actually gmail specific.
>>>
>>> If there is a better way of doing this please let me know.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Jen.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

Honestly, I don't think this hotmailer gem is going to work. Its last
release was December 2006. It also requires Mechanize, and Mechanize has
changed quite a bit since then. If you knew what version of mechanize it
wanted, you could download the correct version, but it doesn't say, and I
can see that some of its use is not correct any more. For example, the class
is declared as "class Hotmailer < WWW::Mechanize" but using the WWW
namespace is deprecated.


Its initialize method is:

def initialize(username,passwd)
  super()
  self.user_agent_alias  = "Windows IE 6"
  @username = username
  @passwd = passwd
  @inbox = ''
  @contacts = []
  @messages = []
end


I don't know if setting it to "Windows IE 6" is a problem or not, but it
seems quite improbable that you are using IE 6.

Here is where the problem you are running into is coming from:


def login
#Logs in the user
  first_page = self.get('http://hotmail.com')
  login_form = first_page.form('f1')
  login_form.login = self.username
  login_form.passwd = self.passwd
...

You see it gets the page at hotmail.com. Then it tries to fill out the form
'f1'. Looking at the hotmail page, it appears the form is still named 'f1',
but this method is returning nil (which is why login_form.login raises a no
method error -- because nil does not have a login method).  I expect that
this returns nil because you aren't using the same version of Mechanize as
this was written with.

Here are the versions of mechanize
http://rubygems.org/gems/mechanize/versions You might scroll down to find
the ones that were released prior to Dec 2006 (when the hotmailer gem was
released). Then you can start installing old versions (gem install -v
0.6.3), and in the hotmailer gem, where it requires mechanize, tell it which
one you want to use.

I'm not really sure how to tell it which one you want, I think you just
replace (require 'mechanize') with (gem 'mechanize', '=0.6.3')

Anyway, if that still doesn't work, theres only about 250 lines of code in
that gem, you can possibly sit down with for a while and get it fixed. Or,
find a gem that works better. This one manually logs into the site using its
web interface. This is a fun idea, but will break any time hotmail changes
anything your gem relies on. There are a number of gems related to sending
email, and I know Rails just got a new one for Rails 3, probably your best
bet will be to check one of them out.

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