This tool is designed to facilitate a programmatic way of creating and emailing reminders. I created it to use as part of a remote Ubuntu 22.04 instance in order to better keep track of bandwidth usage, renewing access tokens, and other important things that may be needed as part of developing programs. It requires a small amount of configuration in order to properly set up, but should be a reliable way of sending reminders via email so that they are external to the remote development server.

© 2024 Pete Smith. This tool is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The tool has four commands:

• remindme add -d <date> -s <subject> -m <message>
• remindme remove <id>
• remindme list [--all]
• remindme help

Firstly, please note that remindme being used as a command is dependent on the user's configuration, described later. Similar ways of using the tool may be remindme.py ..., python remindme.py ..., python3 remindme.py, etc.

add adds a new reminder to the tool's records. <date> should be inputted as either YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM, which are both in the ISO 8601 standard. If no day is provided, it will be interpreted as the first of the month. It is the user's responsibility to provide a date in the future, otherwise the reminder will never be sent. <subject> defines what the subject of the email will be, and <message> defines what the body of the email will be. Neither may be empty strings. Once added, each reminder will be assigned a random integer from 0 inclusive to 99,999 inclusive as its ID.

remove removes a reminder from the tool's records. This may be used either on reminders which have already been sent as an email or reminders which have not yet been sent as an email. <id> should be the reminder's ID. (described in the add section above and in the list section below)

list shows a list of the data for each reminder that has not yet been sent as an email, including its ID. Including the --all flag at the end will displays all reminders, including those that have already been sent as an email.

help displays each of the four possible commands, including help.

Configuring the script to work as desired will depend to an extent on user preference. My goal was to make it callable in a similar manner to a command like mkdir on the command line. A helpful guide to set this up is available here:

https://stackoverflow.com/q/6163087

If desired, the script can simply be called manually instead by using its full (or relative) directory path as an argument to the Python interpreter.

Regarding mailer.py, the script depends on vnStat, Postfix, and Mailutils already being installed. (to note, Postfix is probably interchangeable with similar mail transport agents, however Postfix is the only one I have tested with) The script is intended to be used as the target of a cron job, however this must be set up by the user or may be changed at the user's preference. Depending on the time of day selected in the cron job, the subject of the bandwidth report in mailer.py might need to be changed to something other than "nightly".

Calls to open() in both remindme.py and mailer.py may need to be changed depending on the user's configuration. The full/relative directories of reminders.json and config.json in the open() calls of both scripts should be changed accordingly so that the scripts can access the files.

Lastly, config.json defines various parameters that mailer.py uses. It has four fields:

• "deliverTo" should be assigned a string, which is the intended recipient of the reminder emails
• "sendFrom" should be assigned a string, which is the sender that will be listed on the reminder emails
• "rateLimitTimer" should be assigned an integer, which is the number of seconds that the mailer.py will wait in between sending reminder emails, in order to avoid issues with rate limits
• "server" should be assigned a string, which should be the name of the server that will be displayed at the end of the subject line of reminder emails