Re: How do use the email based diary?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Andreas Davour <anteRUN@updateLIKE.uu.HELLse> writes:

> Lowell Gilbert <lgusenet@be-well.ilk.org> writes:
>
>> Andreas Davour <anteRUN@updateLIKE.uu.HELLse> writes:
>>
>>> I've read the manual and came away confused. I thought the idea of
>>> getting e-mail reminders of diary entries of meetings sounded like a
>>> good idea, but I must confess that I don't understand how to use it.
>>>
>>> I have followed the steps in the manual, down to the procmail rule and
>>> all. But, what now? I have to create a mail with a special header
>>> somehow. I got the impression it could be automated but I'm at a total
>>> loss. 
>>>
>>> Someone care to rephrase the manual, or tell me in a more tutorial like
>>> way how to use this facility?
>>
>> There are several ways to do this; I don't know which node you were
>> reading in the manual.  
>>
>> I once made my own Lisp program for this, but these days I use the
>> standard diary-mail-entries command from a (Unix) crontab, like so:
>>
>> 30      4       *       *       *       /usr/local/bin/emacs --batch -l 
>> .emacs -f diary-mail-entries >/dev/null 2>&1
>>
>> [diary-mail-days, diary-file, and a bunch of other tweaks are set in
>> my .emacs file]
>
> I don't understand what you're doing here, at all.

I'm running the command "emacs --batch -l .emacs -f diary-mail-entries"
from a periodic scheduling program called "cron".  You didn't mention
what system you were running on, so I mentioned that mine was a Unix
platform.  Without digging too far into the standards documents, I see
that cron is mentioned in the Open Unix specifications, and so should be
available on any POSIX platform.

It would also be useful to do the scheduling with internal emacs
scheduling mechanisms, like timers.  That would have the advantage of
being portable to nearly any system that supports emacs, but the
disadvantage of only working if emacs was already running at the
scheduled time.

> Anyway. The node I was reading was 6.8 and all that follows it. In fact,
> the second star on that page is the one I have problems with. It feels
> like it gloss over the exact procedure there. Yeah, I know I'm probably
> incredibly dense here...

The built-in documentation names the nodes, but it doesn't number them.
Therefore, I have no idea what you mean by "6.8".  I got to the diary
node by "C-h i m emacs<ret> m diary<ret>".  Is that the one you mean?