outwright

outwright leverages playwright as a mechanism to send emails via Outlook. It is an extension to mbox2m365 (see elsewhere) that sets up a backend mail server to which any email client can connect. New messages are processed and then playwright is used to control a web-Outlook instance to send the email.

context

Consider the case where some Company/Institution only allows the use of Outlook (or a web-based Outlook) to send and receive emails. Usually the case where a user wishes to use a different email client is not supported. Enter outright that provides the interfacing mechanism between an email composed by any client and Outlook to actually send the email.

prerequisites

outwright is part of mbox2m365, or rather a tangential extension to it. Use mboxm365 to setup the mbox file processor and the email-to-file server.

First, start up the back end email server:

cd mbox2m365/mbox2m365
python mailSinkAuth.py  --mdir /home/rudolph/tmp/mail --mbox messages.mbox --port 22225

Now, make sure the (legacy) m365 is installed. See here. Using a tool like entr setup a trigger on the mbox defined by the server:

 find . | entr mbox2m365 --inputDir /home/rudolph/tmp/mail \
                         --mbox messages.mbox \
                         --sendFromFile \
                         --waitForStragglers 10 \
                         --playwright /home/rudolph/tmp/notifications/notification.txt

(note that the special --playwright directive specifies a trigger notification file to be saved to the listed location)

installation

Installation is either from a checkout of this repo or via pip.

github

For source installation, clone the repo

gh repo clone FNNDSC/outright

and then

cd outright
pip install -U ./

PyPI

Alternatively, simply do

pip install -U outlook_email_sender

running

With the backend server setup, start things with

outwright --email me@myoutlook.address \
          --password somethingSecret \
          --notification ~/tmp/notifications/notification.txt

Now, whenever the mbox2m365 detects a new message, it will parse this into the notification file, which is then parsed by outwright.

limitations

This is an early prototype. Obvious limitations are the use of a notification file that is parsed by outwright, particularly if an additional email is sent while a prior is still being processed.

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