I constantly use google calendar to schedule reminder emails, but I want some of my reminders to be stochastic!

Google calendar wants all their events to occur on a regular basis (e.g., every Sunday), but I might want a weekly reminder email which occurs on a random day each the week.

I wrote a quick set of python scripts which handle this situation.

The script find_days.py chooses a random day each week (over a month) on which a reminder email should be sent. These dates are piped to a text file (dates.txt). The script send_email.py reads this text file and sends a reminder email to me if the current date matches one of the dates in dates.txt.

I use cron to automatically run these scripts on a regular basis. Cron runs find_days.py on the first of each month and runs send_email.py every day. I copied my cron script as cron_job.txt.

I use mailutils and postfix to send the reminder emails from the machine. Check out this tutorial for how to set up a send only mail server. The trickiest part of this process was repeatedly telling gmail that my emails were not spam.

Now I receive my weekly reminder on an unknown date so I can act spontaneous!