aspp / massmail Goto Github PK

Since Python3.3, smtplib supports the with statement (https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/smtplib.html). This should be used to make sure the QUIT statement is automatically executed with the script exits. A workaround for older versions should be provided.

Instead of f = open... one should use the context manager with open .. as f:

Old style formatting using the % syntax should be replace with new style formatting via .format, see e.g., https://pyformat.info/

There's no reason to use anything except utf-8...

This should prevent cough user cough error sending an email with mismatching subject line.

The -f options allows for fake runs, allowing the user to check the email headers. The email body however is not human readable.

• separate testing code
• make it a pypi installable project

Make sure the FROM address is not going to be sent an email, even if in the parameter file.

Massmail should be converted to Python3, while maintaining backwars compatibility with Python2. This requires special attention to how unicode is currently handled.

massmail's source should respect the PEP8 guidelines (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/).

In a dedicated function, use re.match() to check the validity of a given email address. The function can then be called to test the validity of the FROM parameter, as well as for every addresses extracted from the parameter file. It should use a variant of the following regex (from: https://www.scottbrady91.com/Email-Verification/Python-Email-Verification-Script):

import re

addressToVerify ='[email protected]'
match = re.match('^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$', addressToVerify)

if match == None:
	print('Bad Syntax')
	raise ValueError('Bad Syntax')

To avoid accidentally sending ill-formated emails, the default behaviour should be to not send the emails, but only print header and body to stdout. A fake option exists at the moment (-f). One should make the fake run the default, and introduce a positive version of the command line argument.

The return value from programs is an integer between 0 and 255, and 1 should be used as "generic error". Fix the return value.

Right now we can set Bcc but can not set Cc.

Nowadays SMTP servers are more and more strict about how many emails you can send within a session and within a certain time. We should support this in massmail. We need two things:

• limit the number of emails per SMTP session
• limit the send-rate by introducing a time.sleep after sending every single email

Both things should be controllable with a command-line switch, both off by default.

The script should be refactored into functions to allow for proper testing.

Line 165 in massmail.py: exit() for interactive use should be replaced with sys.exit()

The syntax for using keyword arguments is the mail should be made sure to be consistent, i.e.,

• every opening $ should either be followed by a keyword and a closing $ as in $NAME$
• dollar signs should be escaped by a $, i.e., to write $ in the mail one would need to write $$

If the mail text violates any of these conditions, the program should print an informative error message and exit. Users should be able to override this check by providing a special command line argument.

It's not an error, the return value (according e.g. to gnu program specifications) to be 0.

Replacing the keywords one after another requires either additional escaping of $ or should be done at the same time for all keywords.

(do we need it all?)

The argparse module (https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/argparse.html) provides more flexible parsing of command line arguments. We should use this intead of getopt.

docopt simplifies the parsing of commandline arguments and is easier to use than getopt.

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