All of my Beeminder goals are set to “Wrong Lane and Emergency reminders ONLY”, so I don’t get a huge quantity of emails from the Beeminder Bot, but it is still annoying having them clutter the inbox after I’ve resolved the beemergency. This is especially true for autodata goals where I don’t want to have to interact with Beeminder at all if I can help it.
Here is a script I wrote which automatically archives Beeminder Bot emails if the goal in question has data that’s newer than the nag email: GitHub - DrTall/beebegone: Automatically archive Beeminder's nag emails once you've submitted new data. . I’m using it myself and it is great, but there is still some non-zero chance it will go berserk and archive all your emails or something. But it doesn’t request the delete permission, so there’s no way it can permanently eat your email.
Enjoy!
PS: The idea is to run this as a cron job. Hourly should be fine.
This is brilliant. I just shortened the title a bit so it doesn’t wrap (and figured the script part is implied by this being in the Tech category – though maybe it should be in Akrasia so more people see it. I think I’ll mention it in a beemail in any case!)
I have a question. We currently suppress the reminders if you’ve already entered data for that day. (I think that’s still true but I get such a spammy mess of them that I can’t be sure!) So maybe there’s less need for this script if you just set your remind time to be later in the day?
Yeah that’s definitely a better title (I guess I can code at midnight but not English).
I’d be flattered if you mentioned it a beemail! I wish the setup weren’t so convoluted for the non-tech folks but I don’t know of an easier way to authenticate to Gmail. :-/ Also, I guess I didn’t explicitly state anywhere that the whole point of this is to run it as a cronjob.
EDIT: I made a few tweaks to the setup instructions to mention the writable working directory requirement and cron job suggestion.
I did tinker around with setting reminders later in the day, but I’ve ended up in hot water that way. Basically, I want the reminder in the morning and half the time my reaction is “Cool, but I’m already on it and this reminder is annoying” but half the time it’s “Oh crap, glad I got that reminder!!”. I haven’t found a way to predict which it’s going to be until I get the reminder.
I bet you are right that people who get beeminder reminders every day (not “emergency only”) won’t find this as useful. If you’re using the reminder as “Hey did you enter your data for the day every day” then late-in-the-day is perfect. But in the emergency-only mode I find I often don’t have much time to react to the reminder so delaying it is risky.
