CSM Campaign Season - Mass Evemailing

I'm planning on writing an app to assist with mass evemailing during the CSM campaign season. We all remember Trebor doing this last year. It could be argued that his mass evemailing was the single thing he did that got him his seat. Without having done that, he likely would have been sitting on the sidelines this term, relegated to pestering people via the CSM alumni channel.

What will this app do? Well, it won't break the EULA. It will mostly assist in gathering a huge number of EVE character names. You pop in URLs of a website, such as from EVE-Kill or EVEWho, and it will crawl through pages, pulling out character names (along with their corporations/alliances), and then store them in a database. There will be no link to the EVE API. All data gathering will be conducted via third-party websites.

In terms of the evemails themselves, it will still be a manual process. The application will assist in creating the list of names for each evemail. (How character names are allowed per evemail? 10? 15?). There will be a textbox to compose the body of your evemail. Basically, it will pull from your list, n characters at a time. You use EVE Gate's evemail system. You copy-paste twice. Once for the names. Once for the body. Click send in EVE Gate. Then you click next in the program and it will load the next n names to be processed. Rinse and repeat all night long. (It will mark who has already received an evemail, so nobody gets sent anything twice.)

I'll probably add some rudimentary filtering, so that you can target evemails to different recipients. If you want to send a different evemail to Goonswarm than you do Test Alliance, you'll be able to do that.

Is anybody interested in the application? I plan to have it finished by the end of March (hopefully earlier). I realize that the more people doing this, the less effective any particular CSM-related evemail is going to be. But that's okay. It helps to get the word out on the CSM elections, and maybe educate a bunch more people on their importance. CCP is not going to do jackshit on increasing voter turnout, so it comes down to us, the players. Perhaps that is how it should be.

(And even if a bunch of you use this, and 20000 people all receive twenty evemails on the day the election starts, then that blunts and diminishes Trebor's own evemail initiative, which is a good thing. Cuz, you know, fuck that guy and his terrible ideas and his career in spaceship politics. *grin*)

I'll likely make the application and the source code available via Google Code or some such. I don't want anybody thinking that I'm using the program for any nefarious purposes, like stealing your porn or your sandwich recipes.