Ability to email contacts using a template mail with variables based on the contact
I would absolutely dream of being able to right-click a contact in the addressbook, and "Send Message from Template..." with not only the various variables from https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/mail-composer-message-templates-variables.html.en but also the ability to use the contact's fields (such as firstname, lastname, etc., so $CONTACT[first_name] for example?) as acceptable variables in the template.
So if I have an email I want to send to many many many people, but I want to send it to each of them individually and mentioning their first (or last) name, I'd love to be able to do that without doing everything by hand. It would save me a ton of time, because currently the only/best way I've found is this:
- Go to the "Templates" folder in the "On this computer" mail area
- Click to open the desired template as a new mail composer
- Type the name/address of the person to send it to
- Click somewhere in the mail to type their first name after "Hi "
- Hit Send
- Repeat
With the proposed method, it would be this:
- Right-click a contact (or even better, multiple contacts, so that it opens mail composer windows for each of them)
- "Send Message from Template > [pick the template]"
- Check that the message makes sense / picked up the variables, and maybe customize the message a little
- Hit Send
- Repeat
As you can see, I want something "a bit like mail merge", but integrated (Evolution doesn't even have CSV export to be able to easily do a mail merge externally anyway), and sent manually at reasonable time intervals, without the "everything gets sent all at once and therefore immediately gets blocked as spam by the servers" problem and without people being in b.c.c. with non-personalized emails.