clerk

Clerk

Clerk sends your Markdown notes via email. I use it for distributing meeting transcripts.

Security

clerk uses the net/smtp package, which uses TLS if possible. Still, just to be safe, I explicitly discourage using clerk for mission-critical information.

Installation

From source on Linux

$ make install

Binaries

You can get them from GitHub releases.

Usage example

Suppose you've written a note in Markdown and saved it to 2017-12-04_note.md. Your configuration (see below) is defined in jane.clerk.yml. You can now preview this note rendered as an HTML email:

$ clerk distribute -m 2017-12-04_note.md -c jane.clerk.yml
Hello, Jane Doe
Send flag not set: opening preview in "chromium-browser"

And send the email by adding the send flag -s:

$ clerk distribute -m 2017-12-04_note.md -c jane.clerk.yml -s
Hello, Jane Doe
Will send to [john.doe@abc.com max.mustermann@def.de jane.doe@xyz.com]
Please enter your credentials for "smtpserver.xyz.com"
Login: janedoe
Password:

Since this email will not appear in your provider's Sent folder, clerk will send you a BCC copy.

Since clerk was designed for meeting transcripts, you can also use the clerk approve command to send an email with approval request to your boss.

For help, call clerk help or clerk <command> -h.

Important: The filename must begin with a valid ISO date. It will be parsed and filled in as a context variable {{date}}.

How to configure

Here's an example config file:

email_server:
    hostname: smtpserver.xyz.com
    port: 587

author:
    name: Jane Doe
    email: jane.doe@xyz.com
    notice: |
        <i>This email was sent with <tt>clerk</tt>
        (<a href="https://github.com/mp4096/clerk" target="_top">get it on GitHub</a>).
        </i>
    browser: chromium-browser

approve_list:
    emails:
        - john.doe@abc.com
    subject: Approval request
    salutation: Hi John,
    text: |
        here are my notes from {{date}}. What do you think?

distribute_list:
    emails:
        - john.doe@abc.com
        - max.mustermann@def.de
    subject: My thoughts on {{date}}
    salutation: Hello everyone,
    text: |
        here are my notes from {{date}}.