Ralph dropped a note regarding the post Sending lots of Email:

I would just have used “mailmerge” from MS Word: drop the list of
addresses into an Excel file, write your text in Word, Select “Tools
-> Letters and Mailings -> Mailmerge” and follow the steps. No
programming required (Ok, I don’t know whether your supervisor used
Word, though.)

On a *nix box I used a little (bash) script to do the same job: this
script contains one foreach loop, picking the address from a file and
mailing the content of another file,  also rather simple.

Hm. Valid solutions, I suppose, EXCEPT THEY DON’T USE SCHEME! This makes them inferior.

In this particular case, a plain-text file was involved, so mailmerge wasn’t an option—also, I’d be afraid of some kind of HTML monstrosity being generated. A bash script, however, could have been done, although I must admit I’m more confident in my memory of Scheme syntax than my memory of bash syntax. Point made, though.

My supervisor had a message she needed to send to a lot of people today. Given a list of email addresses, and a message, how do you send the message to everyone?

Scheme, of course!

(require (lib "smtp.ss" "net")
         (lib "head.ss" "net"))

(define the-mailserver "some.url")
(define the-from-address "some@email")
(define the-subject "Some email subject")

(define (send-to email-address the-message)
  (let ([the-header empty-header])
    (set! the-header
          (insert-field "To" email-address the-header))
    (set! the-header
          (insert-field "From" the-from-address the-header))
    (set! the-header
          (insert-field "Subject" the-subject the-header))

    (fprintf (current-error-port) "~a" email-address)

    (smtp-send-message
     the-mailserver
     the-from-address
     (list email-address)
     the-header
     the-message)
    ))

(define (read-file-to-los file)
  (let ([ip (open-input-file file)]
        [lines '()])
    (let loop ([line (read-line ip)])
      (unless (eof-object? line)
        (set! lines (cons line lines))
        (loop (read-line ip))))
    (set! lines (reverse lines))
    lines
    ))

(define (send-to-all address-file file)
  (let ([message (read-file-to-los file)]
        [addresses (read-file-to-los address-file)])
    (for-each (lambda (addr)
                (send-to addr message))
              addresses)))

To send the messages, load the code into MzScheme:

mzscheme -gf whatever-you-saved-this-as.scm

and then call

(send-to-all "name-of-address-file" "name-of-message-file")

The address file should contain one email address per line.

I must admit, read-file-to-los could be more functional, and perhaps more concise… but that’s not what I did today. Eh.

I don’t claim there is anything about this piece of code that is interesting, or exciting, or otherwise “good”. It was just nice that I was able to write it in 10 minutes and save someone else an hour or so when they would have otherwise engaged in a tedious, repetitive task better suited for a language in the LISP family.

I have switched to PLT Scheme for so many of my scripting and programming tasks that these kinds of things simply become non-issues for me. I wonder what people who don’t know Scheme do? I guess they program in Python, or *shudder* Perl.

I must be cranky lately.

I grow tired of applications written for the Mac that think they can create files and directories anywhere they want.

Application developers should put all their crap in one place only:

~/Library/Application Support/

Not in my Documents folder. Certainly not in my home directory. Bury your poo in the backyard, where I don’t have to see it. Not in my workspace—keep your application’s big, steaming turds out of my sight.

The most recent application I encountered that did this was Dave Winer‘s OPML editor; it dropped an “OPML” directory into my home directory. That is my space, not his. His application’s content belongs in the Library folder, under “Application Support.”

Mercy. Just because Windows users only have one folder they know about—”My Documents”—does not mean that Mac users have to put up with this kind of behavior. I decided I didn’t want the folder more than I wanted the app, so I nuked it for now.

PS. For what its worth, Microsoft Office, Roxio’s Toast, iChat, Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets), Palm Desktop, and the iInstaller for TeX all exhibit this same behavior, so at least Dave is in some big company, if not good company.