8.1. howdy_email_notif

This is documentation for the Howdy! one-off email announcement commnand line interface, howdy_email_notif. You specify a simple email, with a simple text subject line a simple plaintext body, to email either to yourself at your Plex account or also to friends of your Plex server. The list of your Plex server friends can be accessed using howdy_core_cli, and specifically this command,

howdy_core_cli --friends

that produces a list of friends with and without associated names in your Google Contacts.

../../_images/howdy_core_cli_example.png

Fig. 8.1 For privacy reasons, I choose to blank out the names, emails, and total number of friends who have access to my Plex server.

The help output, when running howdy_email_notif -h, produces the following.

usage: howdy_email_notif [-h] [--debug] [--test] [--subject SUBJECT] [--body BODY]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --debug            Run debug mode if chosen.
  --test             Send a test notification email if chosen.
  --subject SUBJECT  Subject of notification email. Default is "Plex notification for May 24, 2020.".
  --body BODY        Body of the email to be sent. Default is "This is a test."

  • The --debug flag prints out DEBUG level logging output.

  • --subject specifies the subject line. If it is not specified, then the subject is "Plex notification for <DATE>", where <DATE> is the current date in MONTH DAY, YEAR format (such as January 01, 2019).

  • --body specifies the text body of the email. if it is not specified, then the default body is "This is a test.".

  • --test just sends the email to your Plex email account. I find it useful to run with --test first, until the subject and the body of the email is correct. Without the --test flag, this email is sent to all the friends of youe Plex server (see Fig. 8.1).