Need email server aid

[Alvin Thompson]

On 04/24/2010 02:56 AM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
> How do you verify the email source before you implement the command(s)?

If you have the device's public key, you can accept only messages 
encoded with the devices private key.  I believe this is done at the 
transport level (the TLS handshake), so you don't have to worry about it 
in your code or write any code differently--it just works.  See articles 
on how PKI (public key infrastructure) works.  It's quite interesting.

> An embedded web server for remote control is something that would be
> expected nowadays if you ask me. And maybe your own protocol and a
> client gui on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X/OpenSolaris.

That's fine if there is aways going to be a human to send the all 
messages and verify every message is sent.  Otherwise, you'll need 
software to send the messages reliably.  See my message above pointing 
out that SMTP achieves that reliability without too much additional 
complexity.  But I agree that you can (and probably should) add a 
lightweight web server for showing status and for remote commands that 
are necessarily human-controlled.

As a Java developer, I'll point out that a web server with JMS can also 
approximate the reliability of SMTP, but it's much more complex to 
implement and adding a Java and J2EE stack may be use up more resources 
on an embedded device than he wants or has.