noah / tickler-mail

Tickler file (boomerang) email workflow with natural language reminders - for users of Mutt and other command-line MUAs.

Description

A script implementing "tickler file" or "boomerang"-style reminders.

Intended to be used in conjunction with Mutt or another command line MUA.

The basic idea relies on the following convention:

Messages are saved to a Maildir hierarchy, such as:

todo/
    tomorrow
    in-three-days
    next-week
    next-month
    next-year

Where the name of the inner directory, with dashes ('-') removed, is a human-readable string that can be parsed by the parsedatetime module.

The script simply walks this todo directory and for each directory and email within that directory, it compares the timestamp of the file to the current date + the delta of the evaluation of the directory name.

The todo directory is defined in the code by the constant TICKLE_PATH.

Example

• If on Monday I save an email X to the "in-three-days" folder, then the algorithm when called in the future will compare the current time to the ctime(3) of the email + the time delta of parsedatetime.Calendar.parse("in three days").

• If the time now exceeds the save time + delta, then it triggers notifications.

Notifications, for my purposes, include:

1. Firing a notify-send message; and
2. Add an X-Tickler header
3. Moving the email back to the inbox (the "boomerang" event)

Protip

Adding this to muttrc highlights messages that have been triggered and are currently "tickling":

color index white red '~h "X-Tickler:.*yes"'  

With any luck, I'll never forget to do anything important ever again.