All the todo's that's fit to email

May 1, 2013 11:46 PM

I use Piratapad (An Etherpad clone) as a todo list for our printshop with 100+ members, and would like to once a month copy all active issues from the list and email it out to our members. What would be the simplest way to go about this?

The page contains other things except what I'd like to email out (solved topics, general announcements, instructions for using the page) so I'd have to use regex or somesuch to copy the relevant bits from the page. (bracketing the list with TODOLISTSTARTSNOW / ENDSNOW should suffice)

I have an almost-always-on Mac Mini at home which could run this periodically, or perhaps I could have my webserver run it if my host allows.

Piratepad: http://piratepad.net

So one part of the problem is copying the text, the other to send it out to 100+ email addresses. Suggestions and pointers most appreciated.

posted by monocultured to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Like this example Perl script?

The document is easy to fetch. They provide a URL to export the document as plain-text, so you could just use `curl` or `wget` or any other web grabby thing to get the text pretty easily.

Email sending can be a bit more of a pain depending on what type of machine you have and how you usually send email. I could probably just do somthing like:

mail -s 'The TODO List' [a lot of email addresses here] < todolist.txt

The script I linked uses Perl and some modules for WWW/Email to fetch the text and mail it out at press of a few keys. But you could probably just arrange to fetch the exported plain-text, filter out the TODO list however you like, and then use Gmail or something with a list of recipients and just browse and attach or inline the text file and send it yourself.

Doing it yourself there may be other issues with sending the same message to hundreds of people at the same time. You might have to do it in smaller batches or notify your provider that you're not actually a spammer or have a virus infected spam-bot machine.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:24 AM on May 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Curl was much more painless than I though; I'll look up your suggestion, thanks zengargoyle.
posted by monocultured at 12:21 PM on May 2, 2013