Is there a program that automatically e-mails new files?

Question

I work in a lab where many of the (Windows) computers are fairly stand-alone and single-purpose, attached to various lab equipment (spectrophotometers, etc), and connected to the network principally to let people e-mail themselves/post on Google docs whatever results they need.

Is there some script/program that could do something like this automatically? I was thinking about making a little one that would just look for some magic file or magic name containing some address that would tell it where to e-mail new things it sees.

Using shared Dropbox folder, Google Docs collection, etc. seems a little onerous as one would have to manually add other users to it (assuming they even had an account). This would be used by non-computery people as well, who may be scared of a black window with monospaced text.

Answer 1

Not quite as comprehensive as i'd like but this should get you started.

If you're using windows, something like blat would do part of what you need, combined with something that'll detect changes.Offhand i think belvedere might do the trick, but i can't check that bit at the moment. If you can code, you could throw something together like this to handle that bit, alternatively

For linux, you can use mutt for sending the mail (something like echo “body text” | mutt -a attachedfile.ext -s “title” [e-mail] sends an attachment ...) and you can probably use inotify - maybe with a script utilising inotify tools for detection of changes.