Sbot: Perform Google, Yahoo, Bing & Twitter search right from your IM

We perform lot of searches on the web everyday using search engines. Most of the time we use Google, sometimes it’s just not enough & we try others like Bing. So, myself & the100rabh came up with an idea to provide access to multiple search engines right from IM. We built an IM Search Bot, which we call “sbot” which is always available for you in your IM to perform searches.

Sbot supports Google, Bing, Yahoo! & Twitter search right now. Just add Sbot as your buddy on Gtalk/Y! Messenger/Live Messenger & start using it!!

Google Talk – sbot@bot.im
Yahoo Messenger – searchbot@ymail.com
MSN Live Messenger - searchbot@live.com

Once Sbot is added to your IM Buddy list, just start conversing with it. To start with send “help” & bot responds with usage instructions.

• To perform Google search send g<space>search term
• To perform Bing search send b<space>search term
• To perform Yahoo search send y<space>search term
• To perform Twitter search send t<space>search term

I use Sbot more when I’m at work since I don’t like to open too many tabs in the browser at work. One more really good usage of Sbot is Twitter Search! Whenever I’m busy, I use sbot to check my replies by just sending a message “t @hnprashanth”, simple!!

We are open for suggestions to add more search engines & features to sbot, please drop them in comments section.

Search Bot is built using Imified

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When I switched my email ID, I switched my Gtalk ID also. I don’t wanted to use the old ID just for IM. But how to tell everyone about it? My friends list on Gtalk is very huge! I Googled for available options to set auto responder for my old ID. I come across answer.im which just does the job but went down after just few hours. Then I found another desktop application to set auto responder, but this works only when your computer is on. So, I wasn’t satisfied with both of them.

Imified is a free service which provides you hosted IM bots. User can write it’s behavior  in his favorite server side language like PHP. So, following are few things you must know/have to complete this Auto Responder Bot:

• Imified account, off course you can get one at imified.com if you don’t have.
• Web Space to put your IM end point script (Ex: PHP File). There are few free hosting providers which you can make use of.
• Knowledge of a server side scripting language, not must, but if you know, you can add more functionality. I will give the basic PHP code in this tutorial.

Now that you have an Imified account, create a new bot clicking on “Create New Bot”. Give your bot a name & select a bot.im ID, both of these are not important since you are going to use this for personal use on your existing Gtalk/MSN/Yahoo/AIM ID. But “Bot URL” is important here, you need to specify end point script file path which will be accessed whenever somebody pings your ID. In my case, I placed this file at http://prashanth.net/bot.php.

Once your Bot is created, you can see options to add other networks at the bottom. Select the network which you want to set the auto responder, here I am opting for Gtalk. Just enter username, password, nickname and click activate.

Now your bot is active, but we haven’t created our end point script yet, so bot still don’t know what to respond if somebody pings it! So the basic PHP script for auto responder is as follows (which is placed at http://prashanth.net/bot.php) :

<?php

echo “Hey, I am no longer available on this ID. Please add me as prashanth@prashanth.net on your Gtalk to chat with me. Thanks, Prashanth”;

?>

Just open a text editor, like notepad, copy/paste the above code & save it as bot.php, upload it to your server. Make sure you upload it to the same path you gave to Imified in Bot URL field. This is very basic script to enable auto responder, I guess which is just enough. Imified passes various variables to this page through GET which you can make use of to write more interactive auto responder. Go through Imified API documentation for more on it.

So our always ON (24X7!!!) auto responder is up!

Update: As Adam said in comment section, user need not to use any scripting language until unless he wants to make use of variables passed by the Bot. So, for this purpose, we can simply use a text (.txt) file instead of PHP.

Here is a brief post on how search engines works & also how your email ID starts getting spammed.

Search Bots:

Search bots are network of computers used to index or crawl web pages. Thousands of computers are networked to do this job. So, what exactly crawling means? taking a copy of visited website for future use. Search bots copies all text contents of websites to their particular servers, for ex: googlebot crawls web content to google servers. Many people think that search engines searches on live sites, which is wrong! When a search query is made on search engine, it actually searches on its server which holds the content copied/crawled by search bots. Hence there will be a delay in new pages to come on search results. But Google is superfast, which always tries to give live results. Best example for this is how it indexes Tech Bangalore! Articles on Tech Bangalore gets into Google’s index within 5 minutes of posting!

Google Search also has more functionality than just search. You can use it as currency converter, calculator & many more, complete list of functions are given here http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/help/features.html

Spam Bots:

Spam bots are similar to search bots, but they crawl email IDs rather than complete web pages! Spam bots visits web pages, looks for email IDs over there, crawls them all to a particular server. These email IDs can be used for spamming in future. You might have seen people mentioning their email IDs on forums in discrete format, ex: prashnath AT techbangalore DOT com. This is just to ensure that, spam bots will not recognize it and avoid crawling. You can also put an image or flash containing your email ID, because both search bots & spam bots cannot read text in image or flash file.

Yahoo Messenger & Gtalk could be enabled for multi user logging. It will be helpful if you have two IDs or you & your sister/brother wants to be online.

Yahoo! Messenger
To enable multiple login in Yahoo messenger, you need to add a registry entry. Instead of doing that manually, you can just download registry file here. Double click that registry file & restart Yahoo Messenger. To disable this option, download registry file from here & double click it.
Trick by Daydream

gTalk
1. Create a shortcut of Google Talk messenger on your desktop or any other preferred location .(To create a shortcut, right click on your Google Talk messenger application and select Send To–>Desktop(create shortcut) )
2. Right click on the Google Talk messenger icon and select Properties option
3. Modify target location text “c:\program files\google\google talk\googletalk.exe” /startmenu to

“c:\program files\google\google talk\googletalk.exe” /nomutex

4. Click Ok
Now open gtalk multiple times & login, depending on how many logins you want to make.

Trick by Tech Dreams

My last post, ?Anybody can use your email identity to send mails? left you (& me) with lot of un-answered questions in mind. Let?s understand how email delivery system works & how it could be manipulated & mis-used.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the technology used worldwide to deliver emails in Internet. Whenever you compose a mail & send, it goes to SMTP server of your email provider (say for gmail it?s smtp.gmail.com). SMTP server then checks for recepient?s email Ids & delivers it to appropriate mail servers. SMTP server could be manipulated to send spams with deifferent email Ids or identity. This is a known issue from years. Whoever has good workarround of SMTP server, can easily manipulate it for spamming. But all these are bit advanced stuff & dummies can?t make use of it so easily.

The software I downloaded has inbuilt SMTP relay. Which means you need not to configure anything & no any technical stuff. Anyone who knows composing a mail can mis-use it. You will need to just enter ?From? field while sending mail. If you send mails manipulating SMTP server, still server name gets displayed in email headers. For ex: If I send mails using SMTP server provided my hosting provider (am hosted on bluehost.com), email header will contain something like ?mailed-by: box22.bluehost.com?. But when you send mails using this software, there will be no info about SMTP server in email headers! So there is no piece of evidence to find out from where that mail came from.

This is just an example; spammers use more hundred ways to manipulate SMTP servers. They use bulk email senders, automated scripts?etc. Finding a solution to this problem is a huge task. SMTP cannot be replaced by other standard or system, because it is extensively used worldwide. Millions of SMTP servers are running worldwide. Even making huge modification to SMTP cannot be done.

But since there is no other way, we have to keep our hope alive. Anti Spam Research Group (ASRG) of Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is working on tools & technique to fight spamming. Here is what its home page says:

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) investigates tools and techniques to mitigate the effects of spam. The focus of the ASRG is on technology solutions, although it may consider tools and techniques to aid the implementation of legal and other non-technical anti-spam measures. It also provides input for standardization efforts within the IETF

I was searching for a email newsletters software to send bulk emails. Searching few minutes on Google I found an appropriate software. The software was good & did what exactly I wanted to. As I do normally, I started checking each & every option of the software.

In Preferences of that software, there was “Sender Options”, where you will give sender’s email ID & name. When I used this first time I used my actual email ID. Just got bit curious about that option, I entered a non real email ID (anything that came to mind) & sent a mail to my gmail. Shocked! in a second I received that mail in gmail with from email ID exactly as entered in “Sender Options” of the software. Here I will show you how exactly it worked with screenshots:

1. As you see in below screenshot, I have given email ID as admin@google.com & name as Google.

Click to Enlarge

2. I composed a mail & sent it to my gmail & Yahoo IDs

Click to Enlarge

3. The mail got into my inbox in seconds:

Gmail:

Yahoo:

I got this email in my gmail inbox & Yahoo! identified it as Spam. But in this email, no way you can find out it is sent by someone else & not Google. This means you can enter whatever you want in “Sender Options” of the software & send mails. You can enter your boss’s ID, your cousin’s, a bank’s…..whatever. I think you already realized how dangerous this could be. Without hacking anything, any password of email accounts you can use other’s email IDs (identity) for whatever kind of emails. But in gmail still there is a way to find out that is a fake email. When you open a mail in gmail, click “Show Details”. You can find “mailed by & “signed by” information there.

Click to Enlarge

These two info is missing in emails which I sent using that software. But a very less people will look into these options. I am not a hacker & don’t know what’s happening in the background. But I think major email providers should have any algorithm to find out these kind of mails & should block them. Yahoo! even found it as spam, if recipient looks into spam folder & finds sender is known to him, he/she will definitely mark it as “Not a spam”.

Update:

Few more Screenshots

Since many of readers got confused with post, am posting more two screenshots. This time I enter my cousin’s email ID as sender & I will send a mail asking credit card details.

But my cousin is not aware of this email & sent using a software by anyone (here it’s me) And it can also be made such that reply to this mail could go to some other email ID. Gmail is also showing online/offline status of sender & his profile picture on mouse over!

Here my cousin could never know somebody sent a mail like this using his identity.

Aw! This post has become too lengthy.

Name & information of the software I used is not disclosed in article for security reasons.

Group chat was a major feature got missed in Gmail Chat compare to Yahoo!. Now Google brings this feature up, checkout following screen shots:

1) Start conversation with anyone of your buddies & then click               Options–>Group Chat to invite more people into this chat:

2) Invite others to your chat:

3) All done you can add more people into this chat any time:

This feature is only available on integrated chat box inside Gmail & not available on Gtalk desktop IM. We may soon expect this from Google.

As written in my previous post I am switching to Yahoo! If you want to find reasons for switching read on here. Mails & contacts of Gmail can be easily moved to your Yahoo! account with 3-4 clicks! Yahoo in association with true switch offers you this amazing service. Here we go step by step :

1. Login to your Gmail account & disable POP access if it is enabled. It will be in disabled state by default. You can achieve this by going to “Settings –> POP & Forwarding“.
2. Login to Yahoo! mail & click on options. In options click on “Address Book“.
3. Now click on “Transfer contacts to Yahoo!” option as below.
4. Fill your gmail ID & password, Select what all you want to move (contacts, mails).
5. Finally you will get a confirmation message that requested emails & contacts will be copied to Yahoo! in 24 hours.

While writing post on Yahoo!’s move to provide unlimited space to its users, I had hope on Google that it will also launch unlimited storage soon to fight with Yahoo! But latest announcement of Google about selling extra space to add to your google accounts like gmail, picasa..etc clearly shows Google’s intentions. So I think we can’t expect free unlimited space from Google. Now Yahoo! mail has become no.1 choice for me because of it’s unlimited storage, very good simple interface. Yahoo! almost has all features that gmail has & offer even more better services. Yahoo! also added chat inside mailbox like the one in gmail. New Yahoo! mail also has integrated feed reader which is one of my favorite feature. I am switching to Yahoo! & if you also think to switch to Yahoo!, please read on my next post on moving your contacts & even all mails from gmail to Yahoo! with 3-4 clicks!

After making Gmail available to all without invitations, now Google is adding more features to it. One big feature is you can read other emails in your Gmail inbox! which was introduced few months back. Competition between email giants Gmail & Yahoo made them to give huge services without any cost. If you look back 3-4 years back it was hard to get an account with these feature set even if you are ready to pay for it. Few days back I posted on Yahoo?s move to make mail storage unlimited. Now its Google turn & it increased attachment limit from 10MB to 20MB. But this is not enough from Google to compete with Yahoo?s unlimited storage. Google needs to think about providing unlimited storage to its users also. According to my friend Marc, the secret behind ?Unlimited Storage? is most of users will not use much MBs of their account. In the meantime there are few rumors about Microsoft to acquire Yahoo to compete with Google. Another rumor says Microsoft & Yahoo will merge & work together to compete with Google. Microsoft is also eying on Google?s online advertising market, which is huge income source for Google. Now a day almost every site you visit will be having ?Ads by Google? (Including mine!). Let sit and watch fight between these giants & finally end user will be benefited.