Daylog is a daily journal keeper, operating over email.

Every day at a configured time, it sends you an email prompting what you did that day. Simply reply to the email, and daylog records it.

Daily emails include fun reminders of what you did at various intervals in the past.

The recorded events are stored in a SQLite3 database, which you can query with whatever tools you like. Daylog doesn't have any reporting or recall capabilities yet, beyond the past events included in daily emails.

Support: I use this for my own personal stuff and don't plan on supporting it for anyone else, but feel free to ask if you have a question or find a bug.

You need a host that can send and receive mail, with some other MTA software (daylog is not a MTA).

Your MTA needs to be able to save messages in the Maildir format. Configure it with some email address for daylog, with the maildir somewhere daylog has permission to read and write.

You need the SQLite3 library installed.

You need a Cron daemon or some other way of running a periodic task.

Build daylog using Cargo.

See the example config. Fill in the fields as appropriate and save it somewhere.

See the systemd unit. Update the paths, install, and enable the service, which sends emails to users at the configured times.

Set up a crontab entry to run daylog-email <path to config.yaml> ingest on a regular basis (at least once a day).

User configurations are stored in the SQLite3 database. There's no tool currently to add or change users, so just edit the database:

For example:

INSERT INTO users (username, email, timezone, email_time_local) VALUES(
    'some_username', '[email protected]', 'America/Chicago', '18:00');

Then restart the service if it's already running, or wait a day and it should pick up the new user on its own.

Email is yucky. The process of reading an email sent by a user, decoding it, and stripping away the quoted part, is tricky. It's highly fragile, and likely to get it wrong (particularly the quote stripping), so daylog currently saves all the emails it receives, even after processing them, in case you need to re-process them. It works okay when the sender uses GMail, but other mail clients haven't been tested much.

The email mangling code is at src/ingest.rs, particularly the process_body function.

To test the mail transformation, daylog has a subcommand daylog-email mail-transform which reads an email from standard input and writes the transformed version to standard output. Use this to iterate on any changes to the email mangling code.

Email clients that only send HTML messages, without any plaintext part, are unsupported. Daylog makes no attempt at interpreting HTML.