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+date = 2022-06-22
+title = "Daily Plaintext Poetry via Email"
+description = "A quick tutorial showing how to use Python and the PoetryDB API to email daily poetry."
+draft = false
++++
+
+## Source Code
+
+I don't want to bury the lede here, so if you'd like to see the full source 
+code I use to email myself plaintext poems daily, visit the repository: 
+[daily-poem](https://git.sr.ht/~cmc/daily-poem/).
+
+## My Daily Dose of Poetry
+
+Most of my programming projects are small, random projects that are made 
+strictly to fix some small problem I have or enhance my quality of life.
+
+In this case, I was looking for a simply and easy way to get a daily dose of 
+literature or poetry to read in the mornings.
+
+However, I don't want to sign up for a random mailing list on just any website. 
+I also don't want to have to work to find the reading content each morning, as I 
+know I would simply give up and stop reading daily.
+
+Thus, I found a way to deliver poetry to myself in plain-text format, on a daily 
+basis, and scheduled to deliver automatically.
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+This solution uses Python and email, so the following process requires the 
+following to be installed:
+
+1. An SMTP server, which can be as easy as installing `mailutils` if you're on 
+a Debian-based distro.
+2. Python (& pip!)
+3. The following Python packages: `email`, `smtplib`, `json`, and `requests`
+
+## Breaking Down the Logic
+
+I want to break down the logic for this program, as it's quite simple and 
+informational.
+
+### Required Packages
+
+This program starts with a simple import of the required packages, so I wanted 
+to explain why each package is used:
+
+```py
+from email.mime.text import MIMEText # Required for translating MIMEText
+import smtplib # Required to process the SMTP mail delivery
+import json # Required to parse the poetry API results
+import requests # Required to send out a request to the API
+```
+
+### Sending the API Request
+
+Next, we need to actually send the API request. In my case, I'm calling a random 
+poem from the entire API. If you want, you can call specific poems or authors 
+from this API.
+
+```py
+json_data = requests.get('https://poetrydb.org/random').json()
+```
+
+This gives us the following result in JSON:
+
+```json
+[
+  {
+    "title": "Sonnet XXII: With Fools and Children",
+    "author": "Michael Drayton",
+    "lines": [
+      "To Folly",
+      "",
+      "With fools and children, good discretion bears;",
+      "Then, honest people, bear with Love and me,",
+      "Nor older yet, nor wiser made by years,",
+      "Amongst the rest of fools and children be;",
+      "Love, still a baby, plays with gauds and toys,",
+      "And, like a wanton, sports with every feather,",
+      "And idiots still are running after boys,",
+      "Then fools and children fitt'st to go together.",
+      "He still as young as when he first was born,",
+      "No wiser I than when as young as he;",
+      "You that behold us, laugh us not to scorn;",
+      "Give Nature thanks you are not such as we.",
+      "Yet fools and children sometimes tell in play",
+      "Some, wise in show, more fools indeed than they."
+    ],
+    "linecount": "15"
+  }
+]
+```
+
+### Parsing the API Results
+
+In order to parse this into a readable format, we need to use the `json` package 
+and extract the fields we want. In the example below, I am grabbing every field 
+presented by the API.
+
+For the actual poem content, we need to loop over each line in the `lines` 
+variable since each line is a separate string by default.
+
+> You *could* also extract the title or author and make another call out to the 
+> API to avoid having to build the plaintext poem with a loop, but it just 
+> doesn't make sense to me to send multiple requests when we can create a simple 
+> loop on our local machine to work with the data we already have.
+>
+> For 
+> [example](https://poetrydb.org/title/Sonnet%20XXII:%20With%20Fools%20and%20Children/lines.text), 
+> look at the raw data response of this link to see the poem's lines returned 
+> in plaintext.
+
+```py
+title = json_data[0]['title']
+author = json_data[0]['author']
+line_count = json_data[0]['linecount']
+lines = ''
+for line in json_data[0]['lines']:
+  lines = lines + line + "\n"
+```
+
+### Composing the Email
+
+Now that I have all the data I need, I just need to compose it into a message 
+and prepare the message metadata.
+
+For my daily email, I want to see the title of the poem first, followed by the 
+author, then a blank line, and finally the full poem. This code snippet combines 
+that data and packages it into a MIMEText container, ready to be emailed.
+
+```py
+msg_body = title + "\n" + author + "\n\n" + lines
+msg = MIMEText(msg_body)
+```
+
+Before we send the email, we need to prepare the metadata (subject, from, to, 
+etc.):
+
+```py
+sender_email = 'example@server.local'
+recipient_emails = ['user@example.com']
+msg['Subject'] = 'Your Daily Poem (' + line_count + ' lines)'
+msg['From'] = sender_email
+msg['To'] = recipient_email
+```
+
+### Sending the Email
+
+Now that I have everything ready to be emailed, the last step is to simply 
+connect to an SMTP server and send the email out to the recipients. In my case, 
+I installed `mailutils` on Ubuntu and let my SMTP server be `localhost`.
+
+```py
+smtp_server = 'localhost'
+s = smtplib.SMTP(smtp_server)
+s.sendmail(sender_email, recipient_emails, msg.as_string())
+s.quit()
+```
+
+## The Result!
+
+Instead of including a screenshot, I've copied the contents of the email that 
+was delivered to my inbox below since I set this process up in plaintext format.
+
+```txt
+Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 14:37:19 +0000 (UTC)
+From: REDACTED
+To: REDACTED
+Subject: Your Daily Poem (36 lines)
+MIME-Version: 1.0
+Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
+Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
+
+Sonnet XXII: With Fools and Children
+Michael Drayton
+
+With fools and children, good discretion bears;
+Then, honest people, bear with Love and me,
+Nor older yet, nor wiser made by years,
+Amongst the rest of fools and children be;
+Love, still a baby, plays with gauds and toys,
+And, like a wanton, sports with every feather,
+And idiots still are running after boys,
+Then fools and children fitt'st to go together.
+He still as young as when he first was born,
+No wiser I than when as young as he;
+You that behold us, laugh us not to scorn;
+Give Nature thanks you are not such as we.
+Yet fools and children sometimes tell in play
+Some, wise in show, more fools indeed than they.
+```
+
+## Scheduling the Daily Email
+
+Last, but not least, is scheduling this Python script with `crontab`. To 
+schedule a script to run daily, you can add it to the `crontab` file. To do 
+this, open `crontab` in editing mode:
+
+```sh
+crontab -e
+```
+
+In the file, simply paste the following snippet at the bottom of the file and 
+ensure that the file path is correctly pointing to wherever you saved your 
+Python script:
+
+```config
+0 8 * * * python3 /home/<your_user>/dailypoem/main.py
+```
+
+We have now set up the script and scheduled it to run daily at 08:00!