Since a few years, I had been using a script to send personalized emails to a long list of email addresses (which could come typically from a spreadsheet). Examples:
- Students in a class: send each student their OWN marks
(and not marks of all others).
- Send an attachment (or just standard email), but not with
bcc, but "personalized" with first line "Dear so and so name". (rather than a "Dear all", which is impersonal.)
- Some other person-specific info, but auto-generated, etc.
Perhaps info comes from a spreadsheet as latter columns, with first few columns containing email address and name
Please read this in detail if you are interested in any of the above applications.
I have attached a program that uses primarily bash and mutt. (mutt is an email-checking program just like pine or elm). All these applications need a terminal based emailer which takes a "csv file". A csv file can be generated or saved from any spreadsheet: either excel or open-office or from google-spreadsheet.
Please modify as per requirement. Please let me know if you need some help in modifying for your requirement. (You can ask some other person to meet me, if you think the other person will benefit more and is likely to use more.)
There is a bash workshop tomorrow (thursday) evening at 5pm in LCH 301. Please encourage your students, etc to attend.
The bash program is written by our FOSSEE employees: primarily Srikant Patnaik and Prashant Dave.
Other methods to achieve this is using mail-merge add-on in Thunderbird. Prof. S. Sudarshan of CSE has a presentation on this.
-Madhu
Files:
- http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~belur/foss/bash-mutt/csv_emailer.sh (the main bash script)
- http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~belur/foss/bash-mutt/sample.csv file (semicolon separated spreadsheet)
- http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~belur/foss/bash-mutt/common.txt (sample common text: the content)
- http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~belur/foss/bash-mutt/muttrc-for-auto-send (muttrc file (tailored for this purpose) (needs to be kept in the correct directory).