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?

AO.COM... Yes, a review of a website for you all, this lot have a real mixed experience for you, my experience went from being quite happy with my purchase to utterly and totally dismayed by them, so much so that I ended up having to call them and threaten them with a cease and desist order.

Lets explain, Monday our tumble drier died, Tuesday the house was getting over run with washing drying, so Wednesday the wife asked me to sort a new drier... We're strapped for cash, so cheap cheap, was the order of the day, I checked Coop Electrical, and they had a drier, but you had to pay delivery and it'd take a few days, and we have the estate agent coming... yadda yadda yadda...

So I looked elsewhere, and remembered a TV advert for "AO, Lets go"... bringing their site up, same drier, same price, free next day delivery... bargain?>!?!... I ordered, and at the end of my ordering process it asked me to update whether I wanted to be contacted with offers, and I declined.

However, I had set all the contact details, the email, the mobile number to my wife...

Next thing I know she calls me, "Who are these AO that keep calling?"... Oh, I thought maybe they were trying to arrange the delivery...

No! They were telemarketing, trying to sell the wife cover for £2 a month or week or something for the drier, the drier which a) had not even arrived yet and b) she knew nothing about and c) which I had declined contact on.

So I sent them a nice e-mail asking them to stop... because by then the office was closed, but they kept on calling, 16 calls later and the guy was pestering my wife, she said he was pleasent enough, but when she said "I am sorry, I do not do anything with the bank, I can not set up, and do not want to set up any payments for protection" the guy said... "Go find a bank statement, the husband won't want to miss this offer, get the bank statement and read me the numbers, I'll set it all up my end"!!!

THE FUCKING CHEEK OF THAT!

I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and the pressure it was putting on my wife, you must understand she suffers anxiety, social anxiety, that I've even got her to answer the phone is a big thing, but to have this arsehole calling and hassling her was totally unacceptable.

So, come Thursday lunch the calls not abating I asked the wife to read me the number and I called them, and I got this gal, now she was not the one calling, and I said it's not her fault personnally, but it is the fault of the company, she took my info and appologised.

Meanwhile the drier was delivered and my wife asked the driver about the calls, "Oh christ" he says "the number of complaints they have".

Pressure sales, pushing and pestering, pissed me off... And it seems they're more than aware of it, bunch of wankers.

I'll never be buying from them again, and I'm pretty sure if you read this you should take my sage advice and avoid them too.  Coop Electrical, just as good, zero hassle, and we've had fridges and driers and washers from them before.

We will never be buying from AO again!

Also of interest, I used the wifes e-mail, yet just after browsing their site I was receiving junk mail in my inbox... "You've left something in your basket"... HOW THE HELL DID THAT SITE GET MY E-MAIL?... Clearly through accessing data on my machine, cookies most likely, but... That's against EU law, they've just passed a law saying that sites using cookies must inform you they're doing so... The AO site did no such thing, I got spammed, and when I hit unsubscribe you get someone dressed in a badger on the site giving you gip, it's all just not very funny after the pertubation of bullshit they've put us through, over buying one drier, once...

NEVER AGAIN, AVOID THEM!