README.md

Spam Script

Bulk email sender/mail merge app using scripts.mit.edu

Links

• Live demo on Github Pages: https://byronxu99.github.io/spam-script/
  • Demo only. It doesn't actually send emails.
• Use it for real: https://esp.scripts.mit.edu:444/spam-script/
  • MIT certificate authentication required
• Old spam script: https://github.com/wnavarre/email-dictator

About

Frontend

Made with Typescript and React.

• CSV parsing with PapaParse
• Templating with Javascript template literals (no fancy libraries here)
• Markdown parsing with Marked
• HTML sanitization with DOMPurify
• HTML to plain text conversion with html-to-text
• Async email sending with RxJS and redux-observable

Backend

The backend (files in public/backend/) consists of a few Python scripts running on scripts.mit.edu.

• sendmail.py implementes a stateless JSON API. It takes in a JSON object describing an email message, generates the message, and attempts to send it.
• sendmail_raw.py (not currently used) takes in a raw RFC 2822 formatted message and attempts to send it.

These scripts send messages "as-is" without further modification. All of the actual templating and formatting take place on the frontend.

Deployment on scripts.mit.edu

SSH into Athena and go to your web_scripts/ directory. Clone this repository, cd into it, and run git checkout gh-pages.

To update, simply run git pull to pull the latest version from Github.

Make sure that the backend scripts are marked as executable, or else the scripts.mit.edu server will return an error when sending emails!

Development

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App, using the Redux and Redux Toolkit template.

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.
See the section about running tests for more information.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!

See the section about deployment for more information.

npm run deploy

Deploys the build to the gh-pages branch.

npm run eject

Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!

If you aren’t satisfied with the build tool and configuration choices, you can eject at any time. This command will remove the single build dependency from your project.

Instead, it will copy all the configuration files and the transitive dependencies (webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. All of the commands except eject will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point you’re on your own.

You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.

Learn More

You can learn more in the Create React App documentation.

To learn React, check out the React documentation.