John Olinda So I've been rattling around an idea for a tool that functions as a teacher's assistant, via email (or I suppose chat would work as well). It would be designed to interact with teachers, students, and parents to remind about upcoming assignments and calendar events. I'm assuming there are projects similar to this in the wild, but I'm wondering what would be required to roll my own. Probably too much.

Mark Dain Sounds a bit like a tool I built at my company. It's a Slack bot that responds to various questions about Linux usage (not everyone is comfortable with command line usage). Simple questions like "how do I create files?" will reply with a message about touch and about available text editors (it'll always recommend nano). More complicated questions, it provides wiki links. It can also handle poorly written questions like "hwo to delte directory???". Honestly, it just cleans up the input a bit, then uses a gigantic regex. Works better than you'd think.

John Olinda That's definitely along the lines that I'm considering. It would have some built-in data based on common questions teachers get. I guess the only additional component is being able to add information to the bot interactively. So I could cc it on my class emails and it would parse them (I use the same format every day) and then reply to student requests based on that data.

Mark Dain Hmm, I suppose if you used a database with the final (cleaned up) list of questions, you could have it receive the email and add to it. I'm not sure how to have a program receive emails, other than have it poll IMAP every few minutes. Definitely seems feasible. I'd be willing to help you write it - just message me on IRC, probably this weekend.