Summer postcrossing scripts

These are a few helper scripts that were written in 2020 to automate the process of matching postcrossing buddies and sending them each others information for the summer postcrossing event of AEGEE-Nijmegen.

sendmails.py

If you have a spreadsheet containing the matches you chose and their full information, you can use the sendmails.py script to send customised emails to each of the participant, informing them of the details of their postcrossing mate.

However, to use this you should have some knowledge of programming in python and how email works. It is especially important to remember that mail servers can very easily think similar messages sent in a short time are spam, so make sure that you have adequate time outs enabled in the script. Also make sure to test the script without sending the emails to see if it will be sending the correct things.

To use the sendmails.py script you should do these steps at least:

1. Fill in the details of the email account at the top of the sendmails.py script.

2. If you are using a gmail account, make sure that less secure apps are allowed by going to https://accounts.google.com and under security enabling less secure apps. This is necessary for the script to be allowed to send emails. If you want you can disable this setting again after the script is done sending the emails.

3. Make sure that there is a file called already-sent.txt in the working directory and that it is initially empty (or only contains the email addresses you don't want to send to, if that is something you want).

4. Make sure that you have your selected matches in a csv file called buddies-information.csv in the working directory. This file should as a first line contain numbers for each column, e.g. the first line should be something like:

   0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13
   

5. Make sure that the field in the read_buddies function are in the right order and have the right names.

6. Customise the email message in the generate_email function so that it contains the right information. Make sure to change both the plain text and the HTML versions!

7. Check the time outs in the send_mails function. For 2020 we had about 50 mails to send out and for this I used a time out of a few minutes between each email. To be on the safe side you might want to increase this if you are going to be sending out more emails.

8. Test the script and look at the emails it will be sending and how many there are. Do these match with what you expect? If not, investigate the problem.

9. If everything looks correct, uncomment the lines that actually send the email in the send_mails.

10. Run the script again, it will now start actually sending the emails! If anything looks incorrect stop it by pressing control+c. You can also stop it after it has sent the first (few) mail(s) and check in the sent items of the mail account to check if everything looks correct.

11. After all emails have been sent, check whether everything went correctly. It might also be a good idea to put a message on the event page informing everyone that the emails have been sent out and telling them to contact you if they didn't receive anything, or they have any questions.

matching.py

This script was used to create the random matching in 2020. It is far from optimal, so I had to tweak the matching afterwards a bit by hand afterwards anyways.

The script expects a csv file emails.csv which contains an email address and an email for each participant. It then tries to randomly match these email addresses with each other so that everyone is matched with someone from another country.

In 2020 we had the problem that more than 50% of the participants were Dutch, so this was impossible. To get as close as possible I put in a special case for Dutch people. After the matching was created using this program, I manually adjusted it so that the people who were matched with someone from the same country were at least matched with someone from another local.

If you want to reuse this script it might be necessary to modify it somewhat, but it probably can't hurt to try to use it.

License

All code in this repository is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, or (at your option) any later version. For more details, see the COPYING file.