I was just peeking in on my maid on my web cam and starting thinking about the things I could do if Vera could use the web cam as a sensor. This got me thinking that vera emails me, and my webcam emails me, can I set up an “alarm” on my web cam and have it email vera to trigger a scene?
AFAIK, Vera doesn’t come with a SMTP server - but you could just send your emails to mycamera@mailinator.com and periodically parse http://mycamera.mailinator.com/ for the emails … 
I don’t mean to sound like a putz but…my laptop doesn’t have an smtp server but it receives emails just fine. I think it just needs an email client of some sort but since it’s really basically an HTML box, this seems plausible.
I took a (quick) look at mailinator and I’m not sure how you meant to implement it.
my laptop doesn't have an smtp server but it receives emails just fine
You’re right. You’re using an email client (POP, IMAP, …) to get your mails from an external mail server.
In principle, it should be possible to install an email client on Vera. You’d set up an email account for Vera on an external mail server, let your camera send notifications to Vera’s mail account and run the email client on Vera from a scene with an interval based timer, use Lua to parse the incoming mails for the events you are interested in and use a virtual flag device to store the current state. Then use the virtual flag device to trigger other scenes.
I think it would be easier to use http://www.mailinator.com (or a similar service), if you can get the camera’s message across in the subject line:
Use luup.inet.wget to get the contents of http://mycamera@mailinator.com/, parse the result for the subject lines using regular expressions, set a virtual flag device accordingly. Quite easy, if you’re familiar with Lua (I would say, it would take less than 1 hour to get it working), but impossible, if you don’t speak Lua …
What about adding a feature request for “inverse notifications” to http://bugs.micasaverde.com?
Please note that anyone could send a message to mycamera@mailinator.com. This is a more or less serious security risk (depends on the scenes triggered by mails arriving at mycamera@mailinator.com …).
I guess I would rather have MCV allow alarms built into their camera plug in but since MCV is effectively GONE now, I’ll save the electrons.
[b]Please note that anyone could send a message to mycamera@mailinator.com. This is a more or less serious security risk (depends on the scenes triggered by mails arriving at mycamera@mailinator.com ...).[/b]That's an interesting way of handling that and I might play with it just to see if I can but I hadn't even considered how annoying it would be to have my Vera spammed and my bedroom light come on in the middle of the night.
Thanks for your response.