The Mailer Suite

For the past couple of years, I’ve been sending my friends a text message wishing them a happy new year; and a happy birthday text when it's their birthday.

Originally, I started out sending texts by hand, but frequently got caught out when the mobile networks went down around 10.30pm until about 3am on New Years Eve.

In 2010, I decided to automate this, by making use of the Clickatell API – I built a simple application to pull out my contacts from a CSV and then send them a personalised text message. This worked well, but only worked for New Years Eve, and had the limitation that I had to maintain a valid CSV of contacts, which was a pain.

I decided to re-build the application to also support pulling directly from my Google account (and from certain groups within that), and to also set it up to send ‘happy birthday’ messages – the result of which is the Mailer Suite; which has been running happily since New Years Eve 2011.

Yes it's lazy – but it means I’ll never miss a birthday again - and that's genius!

I'd love to know what you think - you can get in touch with me by clicking here and browse/download the code to the right.