Gmail ID for sending mail
It is advisable to create a separate mail ID for use as the sender, as Google blocks less secure apps from signing in to Gmail. Certain permissions have to be given for sending the mail which is risky to do with a personal mail ID. If you do not give permissions you will end up with “bad credentials” error and will receive an email, as you see in the screenshot below:
To avoid these issues, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to your account.
- Click the profile icon in the top-right corner and click manage your google account.
- Go to the security tab and search for “less secure apps” settings.
- The less secure apps option will be turned off. Click on “Turn on access”.
- You will see the following screen and click on the toggle button to allow non-Google apps use your Gmail account.
Now all the prerequisites are ready. A Python script has to be written for tracking. Let us do it step by step.
Simple Attendance Tracker using Python
In many colleges, we have an attendance system for each subject, and the lack of the same leads to problems. It is difficult for students to remember the number of leaves taken for a particular subject. If every time paperwork has to be done to track the number of leaves taken by staff and check whether it is a lack of attendance or not, it involves a lot of time and is inefficient too.
This article will bring a simple tracker & reminder system for attendance. The input to this system is an excel sheet containing the students’ mail-id and their number of leaves in each class subject. For say, if a student will not be allowed to write the exam for a particular subject if he takes more than 3 leaves. This tracker will send out an email to the student when he takes the second leave as a reminder that only 1 more left with him on that subject. If he takes further leave, both the student and the corresponding staff receive emails regarding the lack of attendance. The only thing to do is just enter the subject code and roll number of the student absent from the class and the rest will be taken care of by this tracker system.