Where Everybody's Crazy

I realised recently that a significant proportion of the missionary job is actually a customer relationship management problem: keeping in touch with people back home, sending out newsletters, thanking supporters, etc. As well as that, I want to be regularly praying for many of my friends and contacts, because, well, many of them are missionaries too. And besides, I look back on the number of friends from university that I've fallen out of touch with, and I really don't want that to happen with my ANCC friends as well.

So I started looking around for tools that could help me with this, and really couldn't find anything useful. The major problem I have is, as usual, a convergence one: I want my mail client, my address book and my calendar all to talk to each other in clever ways. I want to know when I last emailed someone, and automatically schedule in an email to them if it's been a long time. In the end, I've come up with a hairy solution made of bits of twig and baling twine, but it more or less works.

First, I've added two custom fields to my address book: last contacted, and last prayed for. Now, I want "last contacted" to be automatically updated, and there's no useful way to get Thunderbird to do anything when an email is sent. So I Bcc every outgoing email to simon@localhost, where a waiting Postfix server forwards it to a Perl script which strips out the email addresses, and hands them to a bit of Applescript (I said it was hairy.) which updates Address Book.

Next, iCal is subscribed to a magic calendar made out of a Perl CGI which reads the Address Book using Mac::Glue and produces a daily prayer calendar based on the people I haven't prayed for recently, and also adds To-do items to email the people with old "last contacted" dates. iCal re-syncs the calendar every day, so stuff that's done drops off automatically. To ensure that the address book's idea of their email address gets carried over to Thunderbird, I'm using Plaxo to synchronise the two.

I have to update "last prayed" in the Address Book manually, which means that if I don't actually pray for the people I'm scheduled to, I get scheduled to pray for them again the next day when iCal refreshes. Meanwhile, "last contacted" gets automatically updated, and the todo items will resolve themselves, again when iCal refreshes.

So far, so good. I have minimised the amount of work I have to do, apart from two things: manually update "last prayed" - which ensures I actually do it, and make sure I put new people into Address Book. Which I think I should be doing manually.

Next stop is, ideally, to get Skype to automatically update Last Contacted as well, which is perhaps a little bit of a pipe dream. (Although I know it can be scripted with AppleScript) But this will help; it's got several applications talking to each other, and provides the convergence that software in the 21st century really should have but still doesn't...