Download

Looky binary

Intro

Looky is a very simple application that sits in the notification area of the windows task bar. It checks a POP3 account and can play a sound and displays an icon if new mail is detected.

Rant

Wow updating this page I noticed it was exactly one day short of a year since I last updated this project. I did everything I said I was going to do however so I suppose I should be pleased with myself.

The previous pop mail checker I used was fairly small (~110k) and worked fine except it played the notification sound whenever you had new mail EVERY TIME it checked the box after you got the mail untill you cleared it. This made the play sound feature useless unless you checked your mail immediately when it came in. And if a coworker was out to lunch and got mail it would drive everyone nuts with the sound playing over and over again! So to make a long story short I decided to write my own and out popped looky.

Looky V1.0 is only 13k nearly one tenth the size of the utility I was previously using. Though it's memory footprint is still fairly normal. Version 0.9 was approximately 52k (40k w/o Blowfish) which I thought was pretty good. Then I read an article by Toby Jones: Toby Jones' Tech File: 01/23/2001, Why I Trust My Compiler over on Flipcode and cut my executable size down to the 13k (12k w/o TEA) that it is almost a 4x reduction! I only had to write a replacement for one libc function (atoi) to be able to dump the run time library all together and I probably could have found a winapi call I just didn't feel like digging through the documentation any longer.

In version 0.9 Blowfish encryption was used for storage of the password in the registry. Since the password is still sent in cleartext to the pop3 server this was overkill but sounded cool. However in version 1.0 I decided the 12k size hit wasn't worth it so I switched to TEA (Tiny Encryption Algorithm)

Proportadly TEA is strong encryption ehough the site with the original papers seem to be down right now but a related site is still around. I only use a 16*8 bit key and it is stored (sort of) in the executable it still keeps passwords from being seen while glancing through the registry.

Version 1.2, November 29, 2001:
Fixed all the current known bugs and released the stable version 1.2.

BUGS

No reported bugs please report any you find.