Done. I took a look at the requests that a page makes and figured some things out. I added that to the post.
Figuring out the suttas is the tricky part, unless you are just going to send out all suttas.
I suspect the reason that the pariyatti.org mailings stick to the Dhp and Itv is because it can be difficult to find very short passages that can stand on their own. I’ve often thought that we need to have a collection of passages, possibly sortable by length or topic, that could be served from an API.
@animitto, I’m inclined to recommend that you take up your own daily reading practice, whether with print books or online. There are a bunch of suggestions at readingfaithfully.org. The advantage of doing your own thing is that you aren’t dependent on someone else to decide what you read. And if you used some kind of app that implimented the “Don’t break the chain” technique, then it would be almost as good as getting it in you inbox.
If you did want to create an email service on your own, WordPress would indeed be a no-code option. You would just need to make a post each day (or schedule a bunch), then people could subscribe to get email notifications. Jetpack offers that for free I believe. There are also plugins that are dedicated to doing mailings. if you wanted something fancier. And I believe there are also plugins that would let you re-schedule posts so you could start the whole thing over the next year. If you decide to give it a try again, I’m happy to offer assistance.