Following on from Nicks chat with me about the direction PaedoBot is taking, I’ve decided to have PaedoBot simulate a 12 year old girls presence on the internet, this involves making a web page for the ‘personality’, an auto email responder so the ‘personality’ can reply to emails and a msn chatbot

As I type this I’m sitting in bed on my laptop, I’ve just finished the first ‘draft’ of my animation for CGA so it’s time to crack on with something else. Today I’m going to be making an auto-responder in python for PaedoBot. I do have an auto responder on the CPanel on my website but it’s not very good, it only has 3 functions and I don’t know how to edit the code so I’ve decided to make one myself. I chose Python because as I was searching for various pre-made examples in PHP there were a few tutorials on connecting to email via POP3 and SMTP. I have got these up and running, so it shouldn’t be too hard to read from a message, then work out what it says, find the responses for the message and send it back to the same email address. I’m considering making an app which would allow for a GUI to make things a little less complicated for the user, but this may not happen.

If I can get the auto responder working I’m pretty sure it will encounter loads of issues for instance:

1. Junk email’s which cannot be replied to
2. Grammatical errors due to the way the user types their emails
3. not being able to handle attachments such as images or HTML based emails

I’m pretty sure that I could work a way round these issues though, possibly through the use of a set layout for the output email and blacklisting junk emails.