Its a known fact that Gmail is the most popular email service available today. Though, utilities for using Gmail as a disk space were out pretty long back; there is another interesting utility called GCALDaemon which can be used to remote control your PC using Gmail.
GCALDaemon is an OS-independent Java program that offers two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and various iCalendar compatible calendar applications. GCALDaemon was primarily designed as a calendar synchronizer but it can also be used as a Gmail notifier, Address Book importer, Gmail terminal and RSS feed converter. GCALDaemon uses very less memory ( ~ 10-20 MB) and runs in service mode on Windows NT/2000/XP.
GCALDaemon, when initially installed, is not configured to do anything. Based on the services you wish to use, it should be configured. In this post, we shall be using GCALDaemon to remote control our PC. As a practical implementation, this scenario can be useful to users who have a very protected network but still wish to do certain tasks with it. It assumes that port 80 of your computer is open. 🙂
GCALDaemon’s ‘mailterm’ service enables Gmail users to remotely control their PC by sending an email to their Gmail account. This management service keeps checking a Gmail inbox regularly, if it finds an email from a trusted sender and with a secret subject, it reads and executes a specified script file. Then GCALDaemon sends back a response, which contains the script’s output. Most mobile carriers and recent phones have built-in support for sending email through SMS gateways, therefore a simple cellural phone should be enough to manage a computer.
In order to configure ‘mailterm‘ service follow the steps mentioned below
1.) Install GCALDaemon. You can download GCALDaemon from here
2.) Enable IMAP on your Gmail. Check my previous postGmail gets IMAP Support for further information on this.
3.) You will need to encode your Password by starting out the Password Encoder application. This application takes in your Gmail Password and encodes it. Copy the encoded password.
4.) Open ‘gcal-daemon.cfg’ and edit the same with your favorite text editor. On Windows, this file is located in C:\Program Files\GCalDaemon\conf\gcal-daemon.cfg as part of the default installation. In case, if you have chosen to change the installation path, please look for the file in the respective location.
A) Set the ‘mailterm.enabled’ property to ‘true’
B) Set the ‘mailterm.google.username’ property to your Gmail address
C) Set the ‘mailterm.google.password’ property to your encoded password
5.) At the time of setup, you may choose your own unique email subject for mailterm. This subject must be at least 6-8 characters long and contain a combination of letters and numbers. Basically, you do not want any word or number which can be associated with you, or typical in ordinary messages. The subject is case sensitive. Start the password encoder again, input your mailterm subject and press ENTER. Copy the encoded subject.
6.) 6) Edit the ‘gcal-daemon.cfg’ with text editor.
A) Put the encoded subject for the variable ‘mailterm.mail.subject’.
B) Put the list of the trusted e-mail senders for the variable ‘mailterm.allowed.addresses’.
7.) Create a new script file (BAT or SH) and save this file into the mailterm’s scipt folder (e.g. ‘/scripts/ls.bat‘). The folder’s location is determined by the ‘mailterm.dir.path’ property in the gcal-daemon.cfg file.
8) Setup finished – launch GCALDaemon.
9) Create a new mail message, put your mailterm subject for the mail’s title, and enter you mailterm command in script name [optional parameters] format. You can use either a single quotation mark (‘) or quotation marks (“) to enclose script parameters.
10) Click on ‘Send’ button. You will receive the script’s output within 10 minutes after submitting your mail.
You can further do some fine adjustments to this installation. Please visit the official page of GCALDaemon for further details.
Also read: Interesting Gmail Hacks
How-to Exclude Chat from Gmail Search Results
How-to show unread mails at the top in your inbox in Gmail.
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Cheers
Vaibhav
Filed under: gmail | Tagged: GCALDaemon, gmail, How-To, Internet, Linux, Remote Control, Tips, Tricks, Tutorial, Unix, Windows | 11 Comments »
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