For a long time, I’ve wanted a little robot to mail me and remind me of birthdays. Yeah, I know there are some online services that do this, but they are notoriously spammy. So last night I took a few hours and wrote my own, and I’m sharing it here with you.
The program is a pretty simple perl script designed to be run on a cron. You basically unpack it, configure it a little, and give it a list of birthdays. The program emails you a week before, a day before, and on the day of the birthday. Perfect.
This page has links to the download and instructions. If you find any bugs drop me a line or a comment. Of course, this program comes as-is, no warranties. Hope that some of you find it useful.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
