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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
