Secret Santa Emailer

Given a file of email recipients, this will randomize matches and email each one their match. The application guarantees that nobody gets themselves, but all other combinations are considered valid. Note that the program will not indicate the matches to the operator unless explicitly told to do so.

The assignments are shuffled repeatedly until nobody has themselves. While this could go on forever, it won't unless you provide the app with only one participant. While that means you will be lonely on Christmas, your home will be warmed by your computer spinning endlessly trying to shuffle two decks of one card unto different orders.

Once the assignments are established emails are send and our work is done. Back to practicing your carols and testing out your eggnog recipe one more time, just to be sure.

Other than the fact that we are formatting emails with an ancient and abandoned library, this app is pretty wildly overbuild. It was able to generate a valid match set on 100K records after 8 shuffles and approximately 2 seconds. Sending 100K emails would obviously take a while, though!

Build

• Install Go from golang.org or however is best on your platform
• go get to install dependencies ( logrus, urfave.cli, gophermail )
• go build to compile the secret-santa executable
• ./secret-santa to run it

Configuration

secret-santa gets its participants list from a JSON file containing. Each participant shold be a member in an array with name and address parameters. This defaults to data/people.json, but you can use any path you like with the --source-file parameter. Please see the example for details.

You must also customize your email body by creating a template file. The file supports {{.From}} and {{.To}} which are the names pulled from the participants JSON File. This defaults to data/email.template, but you can use any path you like with the --template-file parameter. Please see the example for details.

Usage

NAME:
   secret-santa - Secret Santa Emailer!

USAGE:
   secret-santa [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   0.0.1

COMMANDS:
   help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --from-name value      Display name for sender (default: "Secret Santa Robotic Elf")
   --from-address value   Email address to send from (required unless dry run)
   --from-password value  Password for the from-address (e.g. gmail password)
   --smtp-host value      Host to send to (default: "smtp.gmail.com")
   --smtp-port value      Port to send to (default: 587)
   --source-file value    JSON file containing an array of name/address objects (default: "data/people.json")
   --template-file value  Text file containing a template used for the email body (default: "data/email.template")
   --subject value        Email subject (default: "Shhhh! It's your Secret Santa assignment")
   --show-matches         Print the pairings out when sending
   --dry-run              Do not send. Implies --show-matches
   --help, -h             show help
   --version, -v          print the version

Examples:

Dry run

$ ./secret-santa --dry-run --source-file data/example.json
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] match                                         from="Dee Dee" to=Tommy
INFO[0000] match                                         from=Ringo to="Dee Dee"
INFO[0000] match                                         from=George to=Paul
INFO[0000] match                                         from=Joey to=George
INFO[0000] match                                         from=Marky to=Ringo
INFO[0000] match                                         from=Paul to=Marky
INFO[0000] match                                         from=John to=Joey
INFO[0000] match                                         from=Tommy to=John

Real

$ ./secret-santa --from-address "you@server.com" --from-password "your_pass" --source-file data/people.json
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0000] Shuffling...
INFO[0001] sent
INFO[0002] sent
INFO[0002] sent
INFO[0003] sent
INFO[0004] sent
INFO[0005] sent
INFO[0006] sent
INFO[0007] sent
INFO[0008] sent
INFO[0009] sent