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.
speakout-account-info is a Bash script that requires the following programs be available in the PATH:
- bash
- curl-impersonate, or
- Docker
- gawk (gawk)
- HTML Tidy (tidy)
- XMLStarlet (xmlstarlet)
- a sendmail-compatible MTA (sendmail)
- optional libsecret-tools (secret-tool)
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.
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.
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.