How to send personalised mass emails

December 5, 2010 6:48 AM

Sending mass-emails for a newsletter - simple way to 'mail merge' using first names and e-mail addresses and sending via SMTP?

I am looking for either a free piece of software/web-app/service/script whereby I can send out a quick e-mail to a list of users who already opted in to an e-mail update.

I don't want to use something like Aweber/Mailchimp as I wish to send out a simple e-mail on a one time basis.

So what do I need to do to achieve this...

I have a list of around 30 first names, email addresses

I.e. Name, [e-mail]

I want to format an email so it's personalised with the name i.e.

Dear xxx,

and I don't want to CC everyone (it should be an individual e-mail).

I'd simply like to use Gmails SMTP servers to send all the mail since there is a small amount and I want to use my normal personal email address.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

posted by samengland to Technology (12 answers total)

I haven't used it personally but this seems to be along the lines of what you're looking for. I can't also see that it meets your need for being able to personally address people, but I seriously doubt that's difficult to achieve (if it isn't in the software already). If you're not sure how to get it going etc, give me a shout and I'll do what I can to help.
posted by dougrayrankin at 6:55 AM on December 5, 2010

Not sure whether Gmail will support it, but you can do an email merge in Word. I have done merges where GoDaddy was the outbound server. The output was limited to 250 relays per 24 hour period. It worked fine

In the Word mail merge, you can customize any part of the message as long as you have the appropriate data (like first name etc).
posted by lampshade at 6:55 AM on December 5, 2010

Honestly, with just 30 people one-time, just sit down and send 30 individual emails. You'll avoid most spam filters that way. First load the list into your contacts, then do copy-paste of the message text and send. It will take you 10 minutes, and setting up anything else will take longer.
posted by beagle at 6:56 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

You can do it using mailtweak for Thunderbird.

Or, if you use Outlook, there's a similarly complicated process.

You might have to go into Settings in Gmail and allow IMAP access before actually using it. Thunderbird makes Gmail setup very easy, by the way.
posted by mostly-sp3 at 6:56 AM on December 5, 2010

+1 for Beagle. 30 recipients is a tiny number for a one-off if you can cut and paste over the boiler plate. You will spend more time researching any application you might use, figuring out how to use it (i.e., does the list of recipients have to formatted in a particular way), etc.
posted by chengjih at 7:10 AM on December 5, 2010

>Not sure whether Gmail will support it, but you can do an email merge in Word.

Gmail does support it, and I've done it.

Honestly, with just 30 people one-time, just sit down and send 30 individual emails. You'll avoid most spam filters that way. First load the list into your contacts, then do copy-paste of the message text and send. It will take you 10 minutes, and setting up anything else will take longer.

I think this is excellent advice.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:07 AM on December 5, 2010

I've done this with Pegasus Mail, no add-ons needed. Basically, you use a CSV to import from and then map the fields for [e-mail name] and [e-mail address]. Once you get the template set up, it's pretty easy to use for future uses.

To download the manual, use this link. The instructions on mail merges start at page 41 of the PDF.
posted by jmd82 at 8:37 AM on December 5, 2010

Just in case you haven't actually tried, using Mailchimp for this is pretty easy. Just send a plain text email.
posted by oxit at 9:51 AM on December 5, 2010

Response by poster: @beagle - I agree completely and that's exactly what I did.

I will have a look through the other excellent suggestions too though.
posted by samengland at 11:55 AM on December 5, 2010

Nthing Pegasus. I have used it for this purpose for years. Not much of a learning curve if you're savvy at all, and once you've gone around with it a time or two, it's very easy.
posted by charris5005 at 6:35 PM on December 5, 2010

It might be overkill, but openoffice.org has a good email merge feature that I used to send out personalized messages to alumni lists. It sends them out one at a time through SMTP and will let you personalize the email the same way you would a form letter on paper.
posted by cgk at 10:29 PM on December 6, 2010

A late followup:
This method using Gmail and Google Docs looks like it would work. Full explanation is in the embedded video.
posted by beagle at 7:23 AM on December 11, 2010