TagTime on non-Android phones: email-based pings and data entry

[Alex Schell]

For the last couple of weeks I've been using TagTime on my iPhone by scheduling ping emails and entering tags by replying to those emails. It's been working well enough for me that I'll probably be using something like this setup until TagTime comes in an iOS version (or more likely, until I get an Android phone).

Specifically, I run a Python script (at least about once daily) that schedules a batch of ping emails through Mailgun, reads my replies to recent pings, writes them to the log file, and sends my data to Beeminder. At the moment I'm still depending on the Perl implementation for the Beeminder integration, but I hope to port this to Python soon.

For those interested, I put the code on GitHub (all .py files except install.py). Note that so far it barely has any error handling. Instructions are in the readme under the Email Bot heading.

[Alex Schell]

I should say that since pings obviously require push notifications, using this setup likely requires using a dedicated mail app with a dedicated email address, for which you enable push notifications on incoming email.

Lately I've been having problems with Mailgun failing to deliver some pings on time (getting a delay of hours instead of the usual 1-2 minutes). I noticed that the delayed emails quickly get delivered whenever I schedule a new batch for sending, and once I started running update.py multiple times daily, this stopped being a problem. But I'm still interested if anyone is aware of services similar to Mailgun (especially in supporting email scheduling) that are more geared toward small-time uses like mine.

[Saadh Shehzad]

Obviously super old, but I was planning on trying a similar mechanism out too, dedicated iphone mail app with dedicated email. Instead of batch email scheduling, could you push to an email service like Mailgun every time you want to get pinged by email?