a primitive mail merge for email, using Mutt and Python
This is a Python script that helps send batch emails with message bodies customized for each recipient.
To run this script, you need:
Sending an email requires the existence of three files:
- a message file
- a recipients file
- a configuration file
Examples of each type of file are located in the example directory.
The message file contains the body of your message as plain-text. For portions of the text that you want to customize, insert a placeholder of the form <?> where the ? is the number of the item to substitute in (start the numbering at 1).
For example:
Hello, <1>. Are we still on for <2>?
If you want to include the recipient's email address, use the placeholder <0>.
The recipients file contains the addresses of the recipients and recipient-specific information. Fields are separated by commas, and each line denotes a new recipient. The first column must contain the recipient's email address.
For example:
alice@example.com,Alice,"dinner on Monday"
bob@example.com,Bob,"lunch on Tuesday"
Note that strings containing spaces must be enclosed in quotes. (The quotes won't be part of the message sent.) There is currently no support for newlines.
The configuration file contains the subject and, optionally, the CC, BCC, and attachment filename for the messages you want to send.
It follows the following format:
[common]
subject: your subject here
cc: email@example.com
bcc: email@example.com
attachment: picture.jpg
A field need not be filled out, but its label must appear.
(e.g., you can have the attachment field be empty,
but you still need the attachment: label)
Speaking of attachments, the attachment field supports the same placeholders as the message. So if you want user-specific attachments, just use a placeholder in the configuration file and put the filename (or portion of it) in the respective column of the recipients file.
If you want to customize more things, like the from name and address,
as well as your .muttrc, check out the
advanced branch
of this repo.
To send a batch of message, create the files described above and run the script.
./multimail.py
By default, the script will look for files with the following names in the current directory:
- configuration file: batch.cfg
- recipients file: recipients.csv
- message file: message.txt
Any of these can be changed by running the script with the following flags:
- configuration file:
-c/--config - recipients file:
-r/--recipients - message file:
-m/--message
If you want to suppress any output from the script, you can run with the
-s/--silent flag.