

Automate Your Life: Sending Emails - dbieber
http://david-bieber.tumblr.com/post/45294395663/automate-your-life-sending-emails

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Jtsummers

      These are joke examples — I strongly advise against automating discussions with
      your mother — but they aren’t so farfetched
    

A friend of mine did something like this. Rather than a nightly or weekly
phone call, he'd send out an email every morning to his parents. Eventually he
turned it into a cron job when he realized he was sending almost the exact
same thing every day, but then he went home for Christmas. So Christmas Eve,
family all together, 'bing' an email to the parents.

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Evbn
I did the same for a short while. Mom loved it.

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Bjoern
If you like the idea of this then you will also like this one. It goes a bit
further, still on my todo list for interesting fun projects.

[http://smarterware.org/6172/hilary-mason-how-to-replace-
your...](http://smarterware.org/6172/hilary-mason-how-to-replace-yourself-
with-a-small-shell-script)

Hillary Mason

Substitute yourself by some small scripts Document classification

Just stumbled upon a YouTube clip of one of the best Ignite presentations I've
seen, by Hilary Mason, a computer scientist at Bit.ly. Mason wrote a series of
scripts that auto-respond to email with particular content, and auto-nag folks
she's emailed but hasn't gotten a response from yet. Hit the play button to
hear more. She says once the code's fit for sharing she'll put it up on
GitHub. Cannot wait.

<http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/ignitenyc-the-video/>

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alexpopescu
As far as I checked, today is 2013...

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Bjoern
Ah sorry for the misunderstanding the paragraph was just copy&pasted by me
from my old notes file.

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jpswade
Speaking of "Don't Repeat Yourself", tools for these problems already exist.

Namely Google Calendar for those "personal alerts" and ifttt.com for reading a
feed an emailing you or whatever.

Not that it's a bad idea to use this, it's just not everything needs to be
programmed from scratch, there's quite often a decent tool to do the job
already.

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pluies_public
Indeed, and if you want to stick to the command line... Use `mail` and script
away.

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astangl
Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. For all the people running some Unix
variant with local mail, the Python script seems pointless, versus just
calling mail.

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jwilkins
or cli via <https://github.com/dcadenas/gmail_sender>

create ~/.gmail and the post's example is:

    
    
       gmail -t dbieber@princeton.edu -s "Automate your life: sending emails" -c "Why'd the elephant sit on the marshmallow?"
    

plus you can have a default receiver and

    
    
        sha256deep -rl / | gmail
    

also useful is filtering via <https://github.com/antifuchs/gmail-britta>

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Zaheer
Is there a limit on how many emails you can send through this?

Edit: I should add that I use Google Scripts to automate a lot of responses to
frequent support emails I get. These are really well categorized so that if
the program doesn't understand what the user wants, it goes to another folder
where I personally review it. Works great so far but working with Python I may
be able to build something more powerful.

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tlarkworthy
Um, are you not inviting an email bomb in your inbox?

~~~
ColinWright
Great way to harvest programmer email addresses ...

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bluesmoon
if you have cron configured correctly, anything that a cron job prints to
STDOUT will be emailed to the configured email address.

this is how we did newsletters back in the day.

