I found that saving PBEM games from Gmail or Thunderbird to the Civ 4 multiplayer PBEM directory was pretty tiring, so I wrote a program which does the following:
1. Polls a Gmail account to see if there are any new messages.
2. It downloads and saves attachments to the appropriate directory based on the subject (starting with CIV4).
3. Reads text or HTML e-mails.
4. Displays an alert when either a new game or message is received.
My friend and I have been using for a couple of months and it seems to work well.
There is a properties file which you should edit. If any lines are left blank, then the program will prompt you for them when you run it (i.e. e-mail password).
The properties are:
email=[something@googlemail.com]
pass=[password]
pingmin=[minimum ping time in minutes]
pingmax=[maximum ping time in minutes]
subject.start.CIV4=[Save directory when a e-mail subject begins with 'CIV4'. Windows must use double backslash characters for example: C:\\Users\\Julian\\My Games\\Beyond the Sword\\Saves\\pbem]
I've got the ping time increasing slowly so that Gmail is pinged a lot when games are first running, and not so often when the game slows down.
This program assumes that you will use a Gmail account, and that you have a seperate one for your PBEM games (I recommend just creating a new one with 'pbem' appended to your current user name). Also set your Gmail pop3 settings so that messages are deleted from your inbox when read. They'll still be in your bin for 30 days if something did go wrong.
This requires Java JRE 1.6 (downloaded from http://java.sun.com). Double click on the GmailPbem.jar file to run. If this doesn't work then create a bat file containing the line 'java -jar GmailPbem.jar' and run that. The memory footprint is 32 MB on my machine.
If anyone has any feedback then please let me know.
CutLunch (aka Julian)
1. Polls a Gmail account to see if there are any new messages.
2. It downloads and saves attachments to the appropriate directory based on the subject (starting with CIV4).
3. Reads text or HTML e-mails.
4. Displays an alert when either a new game or message is received.
My friend and I have been using for a couple of months and it seems to work well.
There is a properties file which you should edit. If any lines are left blank, then the program will prompt you for them when you run it (i.e. e-mail password).
The properties are:
email=[something@googlemail.com]
pass=[password]
pingmin=[minimum ping time in minutes]
pingmax=[maximum ping time in minutes]
subject.start.CIV4=[Save directory when a e-mail subject begins with 'CIV4'. Windows must use double backslash characters for example: C:\\Users\\Julian\\My Games\\Beyond the Sword\\Saves\\pbem]
I've got the ping time increasing slowly so that Gmail is pinged a lot when games are first running, and not so often when the game slows down.
This program assumes that you will use a Gmail account, and that you have a seperate one for your PBEM games (I recommend just creating a new one with 'pbem' appended to your current user name). Also set your Gmail pop3 settings so that messages are deleted from your inbox when read. They'll still be in your bin for 30 days if something did go wrong.
This requires Java JRE 1.6 (downloaded from http://java.sun.com). Double click on the GmailPbem.jar file to run. If this doesn't work then create a bat file containing the line 'java -jar GmailPbem.jar' and run that. The memory footprint is 32 MB on my machine.
If anyone has any feedback then please let me know.
CutLunch (aka Julian)
