Careful relying on Gmail when sending bulk email. I have seen a lot of cases where that does not end well — your recipients won’t always get those emails, and your account can be automatically suspended.
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That said, I think it’s a useful thing! I don’t know why mail merge isn’t a lot more readily available. I don’t know why my email clients don’t allow me to list a bunch of email addresses as if they were all in their own “To:” fields; that is, multiple recipients with BCC-like blindness to each other.
For your first point, this is why right now we've instituted a pretty low limit of 50. You can obviously do it multiple times, but Gmail sets a daily limit of 500 and so we don't want to make it too easy to hit that.
In regards to the second point, that's exactly what this is. You're right that it's strange it doesn't exist, and that's an opportunity for us :)
I thought this was already done using Google script and sheets. I tend to recall an old blog post from labnol.org specifying exact steps without installing anything.
Fantastic job Streak! Finally I can mail merge within my existing workflow, can't wait to try this out.
Agreed that the blog post makes this look more complex than it should be but after reading through it carefully, most of the screenshots are for edge cases or unique features. The basic "replace first names and send" is pretty straightforward, maybe just highlight that in a separate blog post?
At the April Berlin Hack'n'Tell, Benjamin Kampmann ('ligthyear') demoed mail merge from a Google Spreadsheet to Gmail using just Google Apps Script. See the gist at:
The primary benefit here is that you can send mass emails straight from Gmail. Would love to know which parts were confusing so we can improve the flow.
I don't believe this is possible from tout (although they do have a great product overall).
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That said, I think it’s a useful thing! I don’t know why mail merge isn’t a lot more readily available. I don’t know why my email clients don’t allow me to list a bunch of email addresses as if they were all in their own “To:” fields; that is, multiple recipients with BCC-like blindness to each other.