Sending reminder Emails to other people with org-mode

Sending reminder Emails to other people with org-mode

[Thomas Koch]

Hi,

A common workflow (of mine) is: Work on something, submit and wait several 
days or weeks for a review or reply before I can continue. So I switch to the 
next task.

I'd love if org-mode could keep track of tasks that are waiting for others and 
semi-automatically remind those others in a weekly email that I'm waiting for 
them.

I imagine a command that I could run over my tasks. The command finds such 
tasks, prepares a reminder mail that I can send directly from within emacs and 
remembers the date when I last naged the other.

Any ideas? Thanks for your attention,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro

Re: Sending reminder Emails to other people with org-mode

[Nick Dokos]

Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> A common workflow (of mine) is: Work on something, submit and wait several 
> days or weeks for a review or reply before I can continue. So I switch to the 
> next task.
> 
> I'd love if org-mode could keep track of tasks that are waiting for others and 
> semi-automatically remind those others in a weekly email that I'm waiting for 
> them.
> 
> I imagine a command that I could run over my tasks. The command finds such 
> tasks, prepares a reminder mail that I can send directly from within emacs and 
> remembers the date when I last naged the other.
> 
> Any ideas? Thanks for your attention,
> 

It depends on how you set up your tasks, but I imagine something like the following
will be fairly easy to set up:

o When you submit, the task goes into a WAITING state and several
  properties are added: (who to nag, when the last nag went out).

o You can then write a function that finds waiting tasks, and checks the
  relevant properties in order to construct the nagging email. The
  details will vary of course, but the mapping and property APIs should
  be able to deal with the org aspects. See

(info "(org) Using the mapping API")
(info "(org) Using the property API")

  The is-it-time-to-nag logic can be easily done in elisp. Sending email
  is also quite possible in elisp, but the details will depend on the
  mail package you decide to use.

o The function can be run using a timer. See

(info "(elisp) Timers for Delayed Execution")

There are lots of details elided in the above description of course, but
this is probably a reasonable first approximation.

Nick