The bogan mail merge

Here is a quick tool I made Friday: The bogan mail merge.

Say you have to send the same email to 30 or so people. A sprinkle of customisation would be nice, at least their first names. Maybe you want to tweak a sentence or two for some of them. This is not big enough a job for an EDM platform and there’s no CRM around to save you. Microsoft Word’s mail merge would be an option, but it’s annoying at the best of times and your organisation doesn’t allow the macros needed to CC others in the merge. (Do not talk to me about attachments.)

When you’re about to give up and spend a morning copy-pasting, the bogan mail merge saves time. After you enter your message and data for merging, it knocks out a list of mailto links. Each link opens a pre-filled draft email in your default client. It’s technically limited to plain text, by true soldiers of mail merge trench warfare will temporarily put any HTML needed in their signature block.

Is it perfect? Not even close. Better than sending dozens of these manually? For sure. Was it worth the time? Yes, although there’s a point to be made about the importance and fun of making your own tools even when it isn’t.