Reminders

Welcome to the 'reminders' project. This started as a tool to help automate sending email based on data in an Excel spreadsheet for my wife. Since I'm not a Visual Basic programmer and don't even have Excel installed on my computer, I reached for Python to help.

Installation

The program uses some additional Python modules. So, you will need to install. Here's the suggested method for installing the modules:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade -r requirements.txt

Usage

This program includes many fields to generate emails. A configuration file is required to specify the information to generate the email -- it was too much to try and specify all the required parameters as CLI options.

In addition to the spreadsheet and config file option, here are a couple other options that may be useful:

• -d|--days - specifies how many days before the item is due. Currently, defaults to 14 days.
• -p|--person - used to target at a specific person
• -i|--interactive - provides interactive mode where you can skip single users, or just view.

These options may change over time, so consutling the current --help is the best way to see what you are doing.

Configuration File

The configuration file is the means for providing the inputs to generate the emails from an Excel spreadsheet. It has several sections for improved understanding. The sections are:

• source - spreadsheet tabs and fields
• email - server and address information
• message - information included in the message message

More details about each section below.

Section "source"

This section identifes fields that are important for determinig which action items need a reminder, where to send the reminders, and how to correlate the actions and users.

Here are the fields:

• spreadsheet (optional) - can be used to avoid needing to specify spreadsheet
• user_id - Used to correlate users in the actions and users tabs. This field must be present in both tabs
• tab_users - Used to identify the spreadsheet tab containing User fields
  • email_addr - Column that contains the "target" email address
• tab_actions - Used to identify the spreadsheet tab containing Action fields
  • action_id - Column that contains the ID. Used as shorthand in some of the parsing
  • action_due - Column that contains the due date that is used for identifying actions that need reminders.
  • action_status - Column that contains the status. Anything not listed as Open in this column will be ignored.

Section "email"

This section identifies the email parameters.

Here are the fields:

• server - SMTP server name
• port - SMTP server port
• from - email address from which the email will be sent
• password (optional) - password will be prompted for (non-echoed) if not provided here
• cc - a comma delimted list of email addresses to get copied on each email
• subject - subject line for email

Section "message"

This section defines the body of the emails. Each email body contains a preamble, a table using the columns from the user actions, and a close.

Here are the fields:

• preamble - templatized greeting for the message
• columns - lists columns in table in the email sent to each user
• align - comma delimted field used to change alignment for individual columns.
• close - templatized closing for the message

The preamble and close allow for templating from the User values. The format is HTML for special things (e.g. <br/>, <p/>). The {} denotes a field that will be replaced with something from the User tab. For example, {First Name} would get replace with the value from the user's First Name column in the user tab.

The columns is a comma delimted list of Action columns in the table sent to users. The align is used to change from the default alignment (centered); it is a comma delimited list of the form column-name:alignment where alignment is l, r, or c.

Example

There is a short example in example/. The example allows you to see how this could be used, and provides a little comedic relief. It is best to run in interactive mode (using -i|--interactive flag) so you can see what the table would look like for the provided data.

Here's an example run:

~/reminders/example> ../reminders.py -c config.ini -i
Barney Rubble: 2
What should be done with Barney Rubble's action?
  skip - skip sending email to this user
  email - send email to [email protected]
  show - show the actions (another choice allowed)
  exit - do NOT send anymore emails to anyone
Choose skip, email, show, or exit: show
+---------+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
|    ID   | Action           |     User     |  Due Date  | Notes                                                 |
+---------+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| Rubble1 | Get married      | Barney/Betty | 1963-06-20 | Left open from a long time ago                        |
|   SG2   | Show up to work  | Fred/ Barney | 1980-03-17 | Need to do this every day, so date is far in the past |
+---------+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
What should be done with Barney Rubble's action?
Choose skip, email, show, or exit: skip
Betty Rubble: 1
What should be done with Betty Rubble's action?
  skip - skip sending email to this user
  email - send email to [email protected]
  show - show the actions (another choice allowed)
  exit - do NOT send anymore emails to anyone
Choose skip, email, show, or exit: skip
Fred Flintstone: 1
What should be done with Fred Flintstone's action?
  skip - skip sending email to this user
  email - send email to [email protected]
  show - show the actions (another choice allowed)
  exit - do NOT send anymore emails to anyone
Choose skip, email, show, or exit: show
+-----+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
|  ID | Action           |     User     |  Due Date  | Notes                                                 |
+-----+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| SG2 | Show up to work  | Fred/ Barney | 1980-03-17 | Need to do this every day, so date is far in the past |
+-----+------------------+--------------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
What should be done with Fred Flintstone's action?
Choose skip, email, show, or exit: exit
No more users
~/reminders/example> 

TODO

• Write tests
• Create a Docker container

Contributing

This is an open source project, and I hope you find some utililty in this program (or at least some of the code examples). I would be happy to accept contributions to improve this so others may find it useful, too.