Hack 57 Reading Email on Your TiVo

What's the point of a network connection if you can't read your email?

For many people these days, reading email is like breathing itself. The first thing they do with a network connection is grab their email. Why should your networked TiVo [Hack #49] be any different?

It shouldn't, or so answers Douglas Mayle with TPOP (http://www.networkhackers.com/tpop/), his POP3 email client for TiVo. TPOP queries a standard POP3 email server over your network connection, slurping new mail messages into TiVo's built-in message queue (Messages & Setup Read New Messages), which is reasonably well-suited to repurposing in this way.

As the name suggests, TPOP doesn't do IMAP. That's a pity, given that IMAP seems better suited for the task, keeping its message store on the mail server rather than locally on your TiVo.

Grab a copy of TPOP (http://www.networkhackers.com/tpop/tpop.tar.gz), transfer it to your TiVo [Hack #36], expand it, and put it into place under your /var/hack directory:

bash-2.02# cd /var/hack
bash-2.02# gzip -d tpop.tar.gz
bash-2.02# cpio -i -H tar < tpop.tar
bash-2.02# rm tpop.tar
bash-2.02# chmod 755 tpopd.tcl
bash-2.02# mv tpopd.tcl bin
bash-2.02# mv tpopd.conf etc 

All that remains is to configure TPOP to know where and how to retrieve your email. Thankfully, Mayle has built all this in, allowing you to build a new configuration file from the command-line, like so:

bash-2.02# tpopd.tcl -c /var/hack/etc/tpopd.conf -S -s 192.168.0.1 -P 110 -u
raffi -p my_password

You should replace 192.168.0.1 with the IP address of your POP3 email server (sorry, TiVo doesn't do DNS resolution), 110 with the appropriate port specification (it's usually 110), and raffi and my_password with your email account's username and password. The script will overwrite the configuration file (/var/hack/etc/tpopd.conf) with the specified values.

Once configured, launch TPOP:

bash-2.02# tpopd.tcl -c /var/hack/etc/tpopd.conf

The script will start running in the background, checking your email every 10 minutes. Send yourself an email message from your usual email application, come back in a few minutes (Messages & Setup Read New Messages), and read email right on your very own television screen (see Figure 4-17).

Figure 4-17. Personal email incorporated into TiVo's message queue

The TiVo interface doesn't provide any real way to respond to that email, and TPOP keeps itself to downloading new messages and injecting them into the queue. This means that email on the TiVo is relegated to read-only. Still, it's a rather nice trick at that!