Send an update notice to user

[Magenta Ward]

First let me introduce myself since I haven’t been active for a while.
My name is Magenta Ann and I am currently working for Steve from SUNYPOLY on a few projects and I am also teaching the course Com 375 using the TiddlyWiki platform.

Now on to the problem,
Steve wants me to find a way to let a user know that their section has new updates.
Currently I am using the code below.
[[Send Update|mailto:war...@sunypoly.edu?subject=Updates&body=Your%20section%20has%20updates%20for%20you%20to%20view]]
Steve wants me to find a way to send an updated without using my current code. Is there another way to accomplish this task or is the mailto: function the only way we can do this.

Thanks for your help,
Magenta Ann

[TonyM]

Magenta Ann,

Welcome

Happy to help but I think a little more info is necessary. 

• I am not sure what a section is, is the user on a share wiki, or part of a database in a wiki ?
• Copying you code to tiddlywiki.com does work, but on a scratch wiki I have it is not, I wonder if there is a prerequisite?
• What are you thinking of "another way to accomplish this" specificaly send an email?

Regards

Tony

Tony

[Magenta Ward]

Each “section” would be a tiddler(s) that gets an update, we shall say at least 1 a week.
The writer of the tiddler(s) updates the tiddler(s), after the updates are finished the main user wants to be able to send a pre-filled message to the users.
I know that the mailto functions works very well for this but the writer doesn’t want it to be an email client that opens up and they hit send. Without having our own php servers I would have no idea how to complete this project for him.

Thanks for your help.

Magenta Ann

[Jed Carty]

I have looked into how to do this a bit and never came up with a satisfactory answer for an html tiddlywiki. I your solution is the best I have seen.

There may be some api endpoint in gmail or other email providers that let you POST the email information to their and they will send it using your account, but I am not aware of any specifics.

I vaguely remember a service where you could send an http POST request with the information for the email and it would send it, but I think that services like that have mostly gone away because they were used for spam.

If This Than That may have something that would help. Even if that works I imagine reliance on that sort of third party service is probably a bad idea.

If you can use Node or Bob than you can have tiddlywiki trigger an action on the computer that runs a script to send an email. I think that this gives a relatively good overview of how to make scripts to send email, assuming you are on windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/120011/stupid-geek-tricks-how-to-send-email-from-the-command-line-in-windows-without-extra-software/

On linux and osx you can use the mail command to do the same thing.

If you do end up using Bob or node there are npm modules that let you send email using Node, I should add that as a plugin that Bob can use.

[TonyM]

Magenta,

So are you saying you want to send the content of a tiddler to someone by email with no need to open a separate email client?

Are these occasional messages personalised for the recipient or sent in batch to many users?

If you can't make the client "tiddlywiki" do it, then you need something to do it on your behalf. A server process could respond to an exported tiddler or a request like Jed suggested or on the machine that the tiddlywiki is running could have a method that sends the email for you.

I would still prefer more info. Where are these wikis hosted?, are they single file or node wikis or can you choose? is there one for one user only?. Does this sending need to be done by one user from there own wiki or do more than one user us it on different computers?.

Perhaps multiple messages can be prepared and exported as a cave file with a mailer program then sending the message?

I think we can solve anything we just need to understand what the thing is.

Regards
Tony