On Monday I got a phone call, nothing exciting about that really. But what is interesting is what the phone call was about.

It started with me picking up the phone and saying Hello, no answer. 30 seconds later I get an electronic voice telling me that I would now be connected. A human voiced then asked if the phone number was the one I was connected on. “I’m not going to tell you that, I don’t know who you are.” was my reply.

So the phone call progressed from there with me asking if he was trying to sell me any thing and to answer with a Yes or No. “It was just a promotional call.” That’s not a yes or no answer. So the obvious answer for him was to then say no, which he did.

“Did a have a mobile phone?” (him) – “Yes I do thanks” (me)
“Is it on a contract or pay-as-you-go?” – “pay-as-you-go”
“How much do you spend a month?” – “about £3″ (at this point I can see where the call is heading)
“Did you know on orange that you can get a contract for only £10 per month?”

Back up there one second, why pay £10 when I can continue to pay £3 per month. At this point I stopped him saying that he was after all trying to sell me a something after all. “No Sir, it was just a promotional call”. Promotional my arse.

When put the call down it told me I had just wasted 2 minutes, 30ish seconds of my life. Just wait until the windows (the house sort) sales calls _again_.

The wap part, I used to be able to access my email via wap but it never quite worked due to a part broken mail server and not very good php script. I deleted the php script after a while but still wanted the wap access.
Today I had a look on SourceForge and found WapReader. After changing the default settings to match mine it worked first time. It’s fast, works well and does every thing that I want.

But being lazy I only wanted to remember one location to check all my email. A quick solution turned out to be looking in the $HTTP_ACCEPT variable and then directing as needed. This page proved the clue I needed. For future reference the code line (in php) is:

# If we have a wap phone we send to the wap page
if (eregi("text/vnd.wap.wml", $HTTP_ACCEPT)) {
header('Location: wap/');
}
# else we send to the html page
else {
header('Location: src/login.php');
}


So now when I visit email/ on my server it detects if I’m from a wap phone and sends me to WapReader or if I’m using a standard browser to the excellent SquirrelMail.

Mission accomplished