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+date = 2022-06-22
+title = "Daily Plaintext Poetry via Email"
+description = "A small project to automatically deliver poetry to your inbox daily."
++++
+
+## 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:
+
+```python
+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.
+
+```python
+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.
+
+```python
+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.
+
+```python
+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.):
+
+```python
+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`.
+
+```python
+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!