How To Install Blat Exe

I was reading my boss'due south weblog today, as he's a hard core GTD practitioner - more than than I - and I'one thousand trying to get better at it.

He recently went on an automation ~~rampage~~ kick around his home IT and wrote a pile of scripts. He also tends to electronic mail him cocky quick little reminders that are filed as todos, as do I, except he tin simply type

todo "Write a blog mail on foo"

And it'll be mailed to him with an appropriate subject and tagged in his Gmail account.

He's using BLAT under Windows (using sendEmail under Linux). BLAT is a control-line util for sending email under Windows. Information technology'll as well mail to USENET via NNTP if you lot like.

You lot tin can include all the settings on the command-line, or merely "install" them in the registry, once, like this:

blat -install localhost whatever@yourdomain.com - - FromScott

Where "FromScott" is the name of a profile we'll use later. And then I can create a TODO.BAT (or TODO.PS1) and put this in it:

@echo off
blat -p FromScott -to whatever@yourdomain.com -subject %one -body %1 > NUL

I like running BLAT with -debug, because I'm all about -verbose, don't y'all know.

NOTE: I'chiliad using Vista and when I ran blat for the first time I was warned past the loader I didn't have MSVCR71.dll, then I ended up getting it and putting it in the aforementioned folder as BLAT then information technology was absurd.

I ended up making todo.bat, worktodo.bat and hometodo.bat and they look like this:

first "TODO-ING" /MIN c:\pathto\blat.exe -p FromScott -to me@noneofyourcheese.com -subject %1 -body %1 -debug

So now,

c:>todo "Write a blog mail service virtually how my Home IT is automated"

Enjoy.

Virtually Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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