basak / lwn2email

lwn2email

Automatically email the latest subscriber-only LWN issue to an email address (eg. an e-reader).

This tool requires the user to have an LWN subscription. If you think you'll find find this script useful, please support LWN by buying a subscription. I will respect LWN by not accepting pull requests that allow the script to work without a subscription.

The script is a little dependent on LWN's formatting and may break if they make changes. However, it has only broken once since I wrote it in 2013. Pull requests to improve formatting welcome.

Quick start

Dependencies: Python 3 and the lxml module (sudo apt install python3-lxml).

You will need:

1. A working MTA on your system (sendmail). I use msmtp.
2. Your LWN username.
3. Your LWN password.
4. An email address (eg. your Send-to-Kindle email address).

Run:

python3 lwn2email.py --username=... --password=... --address=...

For testing, you can use --no-email, which will write the newsletter retrieve to standard output instead.

Configuration

Create ~/.config/lwn2email.conf in INI-style, with a single [defaults] section with username, password and email keys. For example:

[defaults]
username=...
password=...
address=...

Now you can run the script without any parameters. In this mode, the script will store a list of newsletters already emailed in ~/.local/share/lwn2email/marks/ to avoid duplicates.

You can then add a call to the script to cron for Thursday morning. Please be friendly to LWN and choose a random-ish time.

License

Copyright (C) 2013-2016 Robie Basak

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.