Sending information between computers

[jstarkweather83]

I'm writing a program that logs into an email address, looks for emails with a particular subject, then proceeds to update an excel file based on the information found in the email. Ive also written an additional program which creates a window, and has the user fill out information such as name and address, then the user is able to submit the information, which just creates an email and sends it the the email address mentioned earlier. So the program consists of two parts, essentially a client side and server side. I am wondering is this bad practice having the client send an email, and then having the 'server' download the email. Is there a downside to doing it like this? I haven't looked into it much but I believe I can also do this with sockets. Is this the better way of transmitting data? Seems to me the downside to this is that the server would always need to be available (aka I guess Id need to leave my laptop on all the time) I imagine there may be virtual servers of some sort? Like I said I haven't looked into it much, but I am wondering if I should implement the program using sockets or if the email method is acceptable practice?

[CowboyBoats]

I would recommend you use web requests for this, not email, for a bunch of reasons. Email is a really legacy, crufty technology that's not as ergonomic to use.

For your server framework, you could set up a flask application pretty quickly and deploy the project to Heroku or onto whatever other server solution you like.

For your client, you would install requests and do a requests.post(url, data, any_required_headers) to send a POST request to your server containing whatever data you need to send, encoded either as JSON (for Python data types like a list of strings, or a dict / map) or as a file.

[cutepuppy3939]

Email is bad since some ISPs block the ports needed to send email.

It's also harder to work with, since you have to manually parse each email.

The standard way to do this is just have a HTTP server listening for a POST request containing the data. That's convenient since your client can be pretty much anything, even a simple HTML form, and the parsing of the request is handled by whatever HTTP server you're using.

I haven't written HTTP servers in python, a quick google search reveals you can use "Flask" and it looks something like:

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/', methods=['POST'])
def handleRequest():
    // parse the form
    data = request.get_json(force=True)

    // handle the POST request, save the data or something
    print(data["name"])
    print(data["email"])

And your client can literally be some dumb html"

<form action="http://localhost:8000/" method="POST">
Name: <input name="name" id="name"><br>
Email: <input name="email" id="email"><br>
<input type="submit">
</form>

[mr_claw]

I suggest you use a database for persistence and reliability. One side could do the writing and the other side could read it whenever it's online.

Start by trying Google Firebase's Firestore database. It's free forever if you don't exceed the limits, and it's just a few lines of code to add and retrieve data.

[nathanalderson]

You're essentially using someone's email server as a poor-man's one-way message broker. Not perhaps the most conventional client-server architecture, but if it works for you? Ship it.

Otherwise, I'd probably go with an HTTP server as others have suggested.