Automate Your Life: Sending Emails

  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.

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...

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/

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.

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

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.

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

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.