Development : Phone Link

I wonder around all day with an Android phone in my pocket, however, I can't always answer it... "No Problem" I can hear you cry "leave it to go to answer phone".

However I purposefully have no answer phone, if you can't get a hold of me, you can't get a hold of me, but what I would like is a method of receiving a message which I can digest in my own time, not a voice mail, not a text message, I want to be able to have left my phone at home and still get the information from it that I've had a call....

I'm a developer... I can do this right?!!??!

Well, yes and no, first of all I started with a Java Application which would read the missed calls log and forward it to one of my servers, this worked, but didn't let the person at the other end know I had been made aware of the missed call, it also logged junk mails and just gave me the number.  If I didn't recognise the number I could be left lost.

So, I set about a but of middleware, I had the missed calls log forward to my server every few time it changed, the server then looked up each number on a white list and a black list.  If found on the white list is looked for them in contacts and sends them an automated message that I had received a missed call and to e-mail me...

Fine for contacts.

Last week however I went a step further, if a number is not black listed it looks them up as a contact then if not found it googles for them and looks scrapes the top ten results.  E-mailing the number and these search results to me.

I've today added a series of regular expressions to pattern match any number or name from the results, and if more then two match it flags it as a contact and googles for them, finding an e-mail address is the target... It will go to my various e-mail addresses and alias, looking for previous missives and will send them a mail that way.

The person has to have had a contact with me, this is not blindly spamming people, and I had had to use a POP3 connection to one of my own email providers as Virgin Media stop SendMail from just working... But, so far it's worked.

Today alone I've had nearly eighteen calls, and it's sent about five messages today, since last night (when I started it) it's send just over twenty in total....

I dub this "Phone Link" for Android, and I may very well push it out to the world if I can polish it up a little and not have it so closely bound to my various e-mail services.  What do you all think?