[Ilugc] Auto e-mail greeter program

[Girish Venkatachalam]

Dear friends,

     This is a program I wrote for my own personal need. I felt it might be of general use, so I am making it public after a little bit of polishing.

     I am sick and tired of forgetting birthdays and anniversaries of people I know. So I thought I will automate things so that they receive the wish automatically from my e-mail ID. For them it will be indistinguishable whether I sent it or the system sent it...

     Moreover I made sure that the mail is sent at 09:00 am to give the illusion that I am awake and typing...

     Anyway It is just a 45 line shell script. Take a look, you might like it.

     But I am assuming few things.
     a) You have mutt installed
     b) Your machine is setup to send e-mail 

     There are other assumptions but these are the most important ones.

     I will spend a moment explaining the events.txt file format as that is the only critical component of the entire scheme of things.

     It is just 5 fields delimited by | (pipe) symbol.

     It is 

     Appellation | e-mail id1,e-mail id2...| bday or mday | Mnemonic date | date in mm/dd format

     Here is a good example.

     Amma and appa |dad at yahoo.com,mom at gmail.com|mday|Oct 5|10/05

     E-mail IDs need to be separated by comma and any number can be given.

     (No comments or spaces are handled outside the appellation field)

     And you can have multiple events triggered on the same day of course.

     Right now I am handling only marriage anniversaries and birthdays. In f uture it can be made to wish for Bakrid,Deepavali and so on. :-)

     So the above line will send a nice graphic wishing marriage anniversary on Oct 5th every year as an e-mail from you which starts with

     "Dear Amma and appa,"


     Just download the file from 

     http://girish1729.googlepages.com/aeg.tar.gz

     and untar it and execute the setup.sh shell script.

     Hope you like it! :-)

     No license complications please. Code is in public domain.

     WARNING:- This program is to be installed and executed as a normal user, not as root. So those of you working as root should change your habit. :-)

     regards,
     Girish
      
     PS:- Comments, criticisms,flames, suggestions all welcome. Please discuss on the list instead of sending me personal e-mail