First Word... "FINGER!"

(sorry about the cheesy Subject line - it's a joke from the old Police Squad TV series in which a kidnapper threw a rock through a window but instead of attaching a note to the rock, he attached a mime... anyway, now on with your regularly expected question/comment...)

Is it possible to use the Finger command with the Inet control? For those who aren't familiar with it, it lets you look at an e-mail address' user info. A lot of schools have it available but I don't think too many ISP's support it.

It was in the older versions of Eudora Light, but I'm not sure about the newer ones, and I haven't heard much mentioned about the Finger command since my college days (>5 years ago now).


"The LORD is my strength and my shield" - Psalms 28:7

I dont think it is. All valid HTTP and FTP commands are in the VBHelp, and FINGER isnt listed there. Could be wrong tho....

hmmmm....not sure. i don't think so, since inet (i think) only connects to http and ftp, not finger servers. anyway, you could use winsock to connect to the finger port (20-something?), assuming that the remote machine is serving...

I would consider using winsock myself, as it is much more flexible than the Inet. If I had any idea of what finger is and how it works, I could help, but alas, I do not.

Okay, I'm using Winsock. I looked in the MSDN web page and found out that the Finger port is 79.

I'm not sure of the internal workings of it, but basically when I was in college (I forget which OS they were using, but it wasn't Windows... I think they were Suns if that helps), I could type something like "finger joeblow@somecollege.edu" and it would return information like:
Name: Joe Blow
Address: xxxxxx
Phone Number: xxx-xxx-xxxx
etc.

but for some servers it would only return a full name based on the e-mail address, so it depends on the server receiving the command.

When you connect to the Finger port via telnet or a command prompt - it automatically submits a finger request, and then spits out your desired info.

The only problem is that most finger ports across the internet have been turned off by clever technicians because they are such gaping security holes. If someones left a finger port open, its gonna get discovered and attacked.

That said - basically all you have to do is point your Winsock towards
<pre><font color=red>Host:somedomain.somecollege.edu</font color=red>
<font color=red>Port:79</font color=red>

</pre>
Then connect. Once you're connected I think you then need to send the e of the person you want. Ie -
<pre><font color=red>joeblow@yaddayadda.com

</pre></font color=red>Either that or
<pre><font color=red>finger joeblow@yaddayadda.com</font color=red>

</pre>

Chief

Well then, you would need to use something like this:

<pre>Winsock1.SendData "finger joeblow@somecollege.edu"</pre>

And then get the data in the DataArrival event.

EDIT --&gt; My mistake, make sure it ends with vbCrLf ... very important. *phew*

I didn't think this would be that difficult. I figured it might be a handy little utility since the finger command seems to have been forgotten. But, unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to work.

Can someone take a look at this and see if I'm missing something?

Yo - i think you need to use TCP not UDP.

You would have to connect to the domain port 79. then send a plain text
<font color=red>finger joe@ms.com</font color=red>
To request the finger.
However - you'll find it hard cos most finger daemons are not active.

Chief