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Send mail with org agenda for upcoming days

By randomsample - Posted on March 20th, 2009
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I previously posted a small Emacs script to send a mail with upcoming events from the Emacs calendar. I used the Emacs calendar for years, but now I think I need something a bit more powerful, so I'm slowly migrating to org-mode. Since I like to get regular reminders for upcoming events, I adapted the previous script to use org-agenda: 


#!/usr/bin/emacs --script

(setq number-of-days 3
      org-agenda-show-all-dates nil
      org-agenda-files `(,(expand-file-name "~/org"))
      org-agenda-include-diary t
      european-calendar-style t
      calendar-week-start-day 1
      diary-show-holidays-flag nil
      diary-file "~/.calendar"
      mail-addr "address@nomail.invalid")

(org-agenda-list nil nil number-of-days)

(with-current-buffer org-agenda-buffer-name
  (unless (eobp)
    (setq text (buffer-substring-no-properties (point-min) (point-max)))
    (mail)
    (mail-to) (insert diary-mail-addr)
    (mail-subject) (insert "Diary entries generated "
                           (calendar-date-string (calendar-current-date)))
    (mail-text) (insert text)
    (mail-send-and-exit nil)))


Adapt the variables to your liking, make the script executable and use it e.g. with cron. Since org-agenda-show-all-dates is set to nil, no mail will be sent if there are no items in your agenda. I also include my diary file, since I still keep some stuff there, but you may want to disable that.
Okay, that's weird...
Submitted by Saint Aardvark (not verified) on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 16:51.
I just set up something similar last night based on the org-mode manual's suggestion about batch mode. The only trouble I had is I usually leave Emacs open forever, and I was getting prompted to steal/proceed/quit because some of the org-agenda-files were open -- no good if I want to put this into my crontab and email myself the output. After mucking about with expect and Expect.pm (surprisingly complicated), I found it was simplest to just put this into my crontab: /usr/bin/yes p | /usr/local/bin/emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs -eval '(org-batch-agenda "#")' 2>/dev/null | /usr/bin/mailx -s'Stuck projects' me@example.com Never even thought about trying to send email from Emacs itself...this idea of Emacs as scriptable is still foreign to me. :-)
I should really read the manual...
Submitted by randomsample on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 17:23.
Ah, org-batch-agenda. I should have known that there is already something like that. But since I already had that script for the Emacs calendar, I was straightforward to just put org-agenda-list in there. As I wrote, my migration to org is pretty slow. I currently only use it as a beefed up calendar mode, and I haven't yet spend much time with the manual.

The thing I like about Emacs scripting is that you can easily extend it later. When I used "-eval", I often found myself producing longer and longer commands because I added some feature, until I finally decided to put the code into a file. For example, in this case it was important for me to not get any mail when there are no items in the agenda.
Thank you!
Submitted by mazirian (not verified) on Fri, 03/20/2009 - 16:01.
Thank you!