Sleep Your Mac by email

Cosentino -

That's cool.
This tip is also good for machines with dynamic ip addresses. You can make them do something easily by email.
People say it's not secure. Why not? It's just an email. Any email can be sniffed. People don't know this email is a trigger. It's no less secure than any other email you send.

It seems that if Mail.app downloads an email before my BlackBerry, the BlackBerry won't download it. So while I'm out of the house I quit Mail.
Sometimes I forget to quit Mail before I leave so I created a script like this.
I setup a gmail account and made it that if that account receives an email (with a specific subject, etc) then it runs an apple script.
What the script does is disables my primary email account, so my BlackBerry can download them.

By using the seperate gmail account to watch for email, I can send it another email and it enables the disabled account.

It also sends me an email telling me the status of the account :)

So how do you sleep your Mac using SSH?

why do all this when you could just use ssh?

You could definitely set a rule to only allow certain senders (yourself) to activate the sleep function...

I used a similar thing (only needs AppleScript, not Automator) to get my BitTorrent client to quit at 1600 because I'm on a limited bandwidth deal at peak times.

Now I just use Transmission, which has a built in "speed limit" for certain times of the day, so I just set it to 0kb/s between 1600 and 0000. Much simpler and less likely to fail :)

Why isn't this a huge security flaw?

"Use AppleScript and Mail to auto-start torrent downloads"
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060612193639842

and similarly

"Use AppleScript and Mail for remote control and file access"
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060420065151134

Here it is:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060612193639842&query=email%2Btorrent%2Bapple%2Bscript

As I recall, this was posted on MacOSXHints.com early in 2006. I think the poster was looking for torrents while at work, sending the .ottent file to his home account and having automator start the torrrent automatically. Pretty neat.