reminder package: automated emails to remind people about deadlines

[kbroman]

Raised in discussion with @hadley, it could be useful to have an R package to facilitate sending emails to nag people about deadlines, say about papers or reviews related to the special issue of a journal.

[hadley]

cc @jennybc 😉

[noamross]

Some ideas might come from the Ruby-based bot @sckott made for ropensci reviews. It didn't do e-mails and was more narrowly focused: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/heythere

[jennybc]

In future, I intend to strenuously avoid all roles that will require nagging on an industrial scale.

But for the sake of argument, I assume the idea is a more general mail-merge package, i.e. a loop-y and tidyverse-y wrapper around gmailr? Having done a lot of this, I wonder if you really need a package or just a killer vignette for gmailr.

Or maybe this issue is just a very elaborate sub-nag directed at me 😜.

[hadley]

It's like mail merge + github + a nagging schedule + a cron job.

[gaborcsardi]

You can now run "cron" jobs on Travis, that might be even better than a local cron job.

[jimhester]

We should probably provide some glue or whisker based helpers for doing email templating / mail merging in gmailr.

It would also be nice to make an RStudio Addin for writing emails. You could probably do all mail tasks in RStudio if you really sunk some time into it.

[jennybc]

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

[karthik]

@jimhester I wrote an internal package (just last month) to notify conference participants of abstract status, acceptance, talk prep guidelines etc relying almost entirely on the guidelines and templates from gmailr and related resources. I've been thinking about turning that into something for more general use (with additional UI to provide reports on when people were notified etc) but it might just be something you could add into gmailr if you think a separate package isn't necessary.

R doesn't seem like the hammer to hit every nail with and for automated emails, it seems like a rather poor choice. There are also two different use cases being mixed here too:

a) automated email notifications b) automated Github notifications (@noamross has linked to some great preliminary work by @sckott with heythere). At JOSS, we are trying to have more automated Github pings (notify reviewers for late reviews, or no response from authors after $y days). But that effort will be more Ruby based.

Other comments:

The suggested package name rubs me the wrong way. I for one, am guilty of failing miserably at keeping to the deadlines of this special issue. I'll own that. At the same time I am often at the end of being exhausted from chasing people down for reviews, deliverables quite often (I quite often give up and find someone else to take over). The answer to this does not seem to be let's drown everyone in every increasing emails from the nagger package. It might be friendlier to call it the reminder package or something like that.

[hadley]

Also "nagger" is one letter away from being highly offensive. reminder would be more in the spirit of the idea (I was also thinking it's something you could use on yourself)