"Mail merge" is a process that uses an addressbook or mailing list database to personalize "form letters" where variables in the letter are substituted with values from the database. I recall using this system in DOS-era WordPerfect but I'm sure personalized form letters predate digital word processing.
This incarnation of mailmerge is a command line tool designed to work with GMail (although it could easily be adapted to other mail systems).
mailmerge takes a single argument - the file containing the template
and data.
The template file should have three sections divided by two lines containing the seperator token #---#. These sections contain:
- Header variables (from, subject) in YAML format,
- The email body in Python string template format, and
- Tab seperated values (TSV) to sub into (1) and (2) with labeled columns
Two column names in the TSV file have special meaning. The 'email' column will be the recipient. The 'cc' column, if present, will be CCed.
An example is provided.