Update: 5 April 2010: Lifehacker has a detailed post that shows how to set up mail merge in Gmail.
My need seemed simple enough.
I had a spreadsheet of e-mail addresses, usernames, and passwords that I’d created for a client’s WordPress site. I needed to take the spreadsheet data and merge the data into an e-mail template. I needed to do this because it seems that WordPress won’t send out registration confirmation e-mails to users who are manually registered by a web site’s administrator, but let’s not get into that as it could be the subject of an entire post on its own.
Lately I’ve been using Google Docs to create spreadsheets and word processing documents at work. I use it so much in fact that I rarely use Microsoft Office anymore. My beef with Microsoft is that their interfaces and workflows leave a lot to be desired. If I can find an easier, more elegant solution to a problem that I’d ordinarily use a Microsoft product for, I’m a happy girl. I keep the applications around to combat any strange conversion issues, but by and large I live a relatively Microsoft-free existence. I’ve been using Gmail exclusively for my personal e-mail, and I’ve even gone so far as to enable Google Docs for this domain. The Google Kool-Aid is tasty and refreshing.
I so trusted the Google engineers and their productivity suite of applications that I just knew that creating an e-mail merge with Google Spreadsheets and Gmail would be easy-peasy.
Not only was it not easy, it’s impossible. At present, this functionality isn’t available in Gmail or Google Docs. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.
Undaunted, I looked into doing an e-mail merge with Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet application and Apple’s Mail client. While mail can do a rudimentary e-mail merge, the data has to live in Apple’s Address book for the merge to work. I realize Numbers is (severely) lacking in features compared to Excel, but I didn’t expect Apple — the company that embodies elegant and easy computing — to make it so challenging to complete this task.
To use a baseball analogy, I’m at bat with two strikes, the bases loaded, and two outs.
I was feeling sufficiently chastised by this point, so I gave up and launched Excel and Word to create a Mail Merge. Leave it to Microsoft to require a third step in what should be a two step solution – instead of being able to create the merge document in Entourage (Microsoft’s e-mail client for the Mac), I had to first create a spreadsheet in Excel, create a template document in Word, and then complete the merge by sending the finished messages to Entourage.
Take a wild guess as to how this one turned out. Let that graphic above give you a hint.
Apparently, Word and Entourage aren’t on speaking terms, because Word “couldn’t recognize (my) default e-mail program” even though I’d changed my default program from Gmail to Entourage several times. I not only set the preference in Entourage, I opened Mail to make sure that Entourage was declared as the default mail program, but no matter what I tried — cursing, sighing, bargaining with God — I couldn’t get this rasted blasted e-mail merge to work!
Where did that leave me, you ask? It’s simple – I finished the mail merge, generated separate Word documents for each e-mail, and manually crafted each message by cutting and pasting the data into separate messages. I only had about 10 of these to do, but can you imagine what a nightmare scenario this would be if I were dealing with hundreds of e-mail messages?
How do you manage e-mail merges?
{ 12 comments }
UG! That sounds like a major pain. Thankfully, I’ve never had to do that before/yet?
I sure have the same issue! This would be an easy Firefox plug-in for someone, but Google should get on top of it.
I, admittedly am using outlook and bought an add-on program called easy mail merge that means you don't have to edit your email in word (I prefer to do mine just in HTML) and it works quite nicely and will modify the subject line and include an unsubscribe link too if you wish to reuse your session (I need to learn more about this). Anyway, I bought a licence (you can trial it for free) and it saved me hours. I'd love to see mail merge in google and also can't wait for the day I can be free of microsoft. Sadly, the only office product I really do like is Outlook – I haven't found another system that works better for my requirements – though I do use google mail and thunderbird as a matter of principal and only use outlook exchange as required by contracts… still, I like the way it works EXCEPT for the fact that if you dutifully back up your email you cannot access your archives unless you have outlook installed… it's not compatible and that is why I use the other systems even though I do like Outlook… the lack of compatiblity outweighs the good points.
I was looking for a similar solution. I copied a column from a google spreadsheet and pasted straight into the BCC fields in Macmail. Macmail helpfully inserted commas between contacts. Hope this helps
I am with you up to that last step. I also tried and failed with numerous programs in Mac. In the end I punted: wrote the doc in ms word, used the data from a spreadsheet in excel and merged straight into the outbox in entourage (which I otherwise no longer use). It was simple and elegant, just as it should be.
The biggest problem was getting the data from mac mail to the excel sheet; mail did not seem willing to export a file that excel could read. Luckily one of the third-party bulk mail programs that I had tried (which failed) did manage to extract the info from mail and export it to excel.
You are right. This should be easy but in mac world it's not easy without microsoft products. I prefer to avoid them but in this case I was damn glad for them.
Follow up: I did find a way to do this in mac using Automator (which comes with the mac in the Applications folder). I did a brief test and it seemed to work well.
Just as I said I prefer to avoid microsoft, I find that 3rd-party programs for mac are often hinky at best. It seems that this can be done with native mac products although they don't make it easy to find or figure out. I hate to say it but I think the ms word/excel/entourage merge is more elegant.
That's interesting to know that it would automatically add commas between contacts. Thanks for that tidbit, Anthony.
Do you remember what the Automator action was called?
yes, it's called Group Emailer. There is a template for it built into
Automator and I downloaded a filled-out template from some website.
It was very easy to customize.
Thanks!
It's actually possible to do a mail merge using Google Docs & Gmail. I need to do almost exactly the same thing you did and followed this tutorial:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/scripts/mail_m...
You only need to modify a few parts. I'm clueless abt javascript and this is my first attempt at mail merge but it only took me a few minutes to get everything up and running. Yey for Google!
You can also try Mozilla Thunderbird with an add-on: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mail_merge
It wasn't possible in 2008, which is when I wrote this post.
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