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Retrieves account balance information for a Canadian SpeakOut cellphone account

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SpeakOut Account Info

speakout-account-info is a simple program that retrieves account balance information for a Canadian SpeakOut cellphone account. It can also send you an e-mail with the balance information, or just send you one on a low balance.

It has been tested on a Linux desktop, but should work equally well on other POSIX operating systems, Mac OS X, or on Windows with a POSIX environment installed (like msys2 or WSL), as long as the prerequisites listed below are also available.

7-Eleven SpeakOut Wireless™ is a registered trademark of 7-Eleven.

Prerequisites

speakout-account-info is a Bash script that requires the following programs be available in the PATH:

Configuration

Copy the sample speakoutinforc file to $HOME/.config/ and edit it to match your requirements. At minimum, account must be set to the e-mail address used to log in at https://www.speakout7eleven.ca/. password must also be set to the account password, unless it is stored using secret-tool in which case it must be left empty. In that case, store the password by running the following command:

secret-tool store --label="SpeakOut Account" speakout-account "$account"

where $account is replaced by the account e-mail address. You will be prompted for the password and secret-tool will store it encrypted for later use.

Set recipient to one or more comma-separated e-mail addresses which will be the recipients of the balance e-mails.

Set warnlimit to the dollar amount below which an warning e-mail will be sent when the script is run. lowmail must be set to yes for an e-mail to actually be sent.

Set expirydays to the number of days before expiry of the balance after which a warning e-mail will be sent. This defaults to 7. lowmail must be set to yes for an e-mail to actually be sent.

Set lowmail to yes to have the script send an e-mail whenever the balance goes below warnlimit or the expiry date is within expirydays.

Set alwaysmail to yes to have the script send an e-mail every time it is run, regardless of the limit. Leave it blank to only mail below the warning limit.

Set quiet to yes to have the script display nothing except on error. Leave it blank to have the script display the account information.

Set mailer to a command that takes an e-mail message with headers on stdin and mails it. This defaults to sendmail -oi -t.

Set curl to a curl-impersonate command. This defaults to curl_ff109. curl-impersonate is a version of curl that closely mimics the ways browsers perform requests; regular curl no longer works since March 2023. If you don't have curl-impersonate installed but do have Docker, you can set this to:

docker run --rm -v $curldir:$curldir lwthiker/curl-impersonate:0.5-ff curl_ff109

to run curl-impersonate in a Docker container. The literal string $curldir is a variable that is automatically replaced by shell with the temporary directory in which various files are placed that are needed by curl to perform a request.

The speakoutinforc file is actually a Bourne shell script so shell quoting rules are in effect.

Running

Place the file speakout-account-info somewhere in your PATH and execute it with speakout-account-info. By default, it will retrieve the account information and write out the phone number, balance in dollars, and balance expiry date on one line separated with spaces. There are a number of command-line options available to change this behaviour.

--help will show a brief list of options and the version number.

--quiet will cause the script to act as though quiet=yes were found in the configuration file.

--alwaysmail will cause the script to act as though alwaysmail=yes were found in the configuration file.

--lowmail will cause the script to act as though lowmail=yes were found in the configuration file.

Note that the command-line processor is simplistic and if more than one command-line option is given, they must be given in the order given above.

The script is well-suited to be run periodically as a cron job. This is straightforward when the password is found in the configuration file, but trickier when it is stored with secret-tool. In the latter case, secret-tool will generally attempt to ask for the keyring unlock password on each invocation, which will fail because the cron job has no screen or tty on which to request it. To avoid this, start a long-running D-Bus session (which may be as simple as dbus-launch true) and use secret-tool to unlock the keyring once in that session manually. Then, ensure the DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS environment variable for the cron job is set to use that D-Bus session. This should work until the next reboot when the keyring will need to be unlocked again.

In the case of an error, the script will display a message as to what stage it was in when the error occurred, and possibly a more verbose error message from a called program. The return code of the program will be non-zero in case of an error.

Note that the SpeakOut web site goes down for maintenance for one hour each evening (at the time of this writing), during which time speakout-account-info will not work.

The account information is retrieved by scraping the account web site, so it is liable to be brittle. Check back for an update to this program if it starts failing consistently.

Author

Daniel Fandrich dan@coneharvesters.com

See more info at the project home page.

This program is Copyright © 2022–2024 Daniel Fandrich. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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