How to using picaxe net web server to send emails

Question

Hi, I want to use PICAXE NET WEB SERVER from here to use to it as sending emails to a known email address. Can anyone please let me know if it is possible to do that? Since it supports only HTML, I am wondering how exactly it is possible do what I want?

Answer 1

You send email with SMTP. You serve web pages with HTTP. Both are higher level protocols that operate over TCP/IP. Since the PIC sample code supplies the network stack and an HTTP server, it should be possible to write enough of an SMTP client to do the job. It is highly likely, howver, that a web server doesn't provide an email sender. That would normally be done with a separate CGI script on a "real" server.

One minimal email client I've encountered is BLAT. It may be worth examining for ideas. But it is still larger than you would want to implement in a PIC. Fortunately there is an active user community for the PIC, and this has been discussed at their forum.

The basic interaction with the server is quite straightforward, if the SMTP server is not requiring authentication. For that reason, you might want to set up a mail server on your local network that runs an open mail server for your device, and does full authentication to the outside world.