W3C supports a mailbox, www-archive@…, for making a public archive of any W3C/web-related business. Any message sent there is archived using the normal mailing list archive mechanism[…] So if you want to have a conversation with somebody, with a public archive, but without copying all the subscribers to public-html@…, you're welcome to send it there.

— Dan Connolly’s explanation of www-archive to the HTMLWG

When reading the above, I thought that having such a drop-box for personal mail archiving would be pretty handy. Several times a month I end up writing an email to some mailing list that might make a good blog post, if only I remembered to do so.

A bit of hacking later, and now I can just BCC a special address here on rakim. The email will be treated as markdown and automagically formatted into an Atom Entry Document for drop-in inclusion into my blog backend.

Here’s the entire script sendmail runs (atomblog is the completely unoriginal working name for my backend code):

#!/usr/bin/env python

import email, sys
from atomblog import BlogPost

if __name__ == '__main__':
    msg = email.message_from_file(sys.stdin)
    BlogPost.from_message(msg)