Increase Thundebird’s Mass Mailing Capabilities

The desktop email client Thunderbird does offer mass mailing capabilities by default. It is possible to add multiple recipients for an email. Problems appear however if the number of recipients is extremely large (more than 100 for example) and if the individual recipients should not see the other recipients that received the email. The second problem can be tackled by adding each recipient in the BCC (blind carbon copy) field and a personal email address in the To field. The first problem can be solved by writing multiple emails below the maximum recipient per email limit. Both solutions increase the workload of the user writing the emails. They also make it more difficulty to keep track of the process as the user now has to handle multiple emails instead of just one.

Mail Merge is an experimental Thunderbird add-on that increases the email client’s mass mailing capabilities. It does so by introducing two new options to the email software: Mass Mail and Personal Mail.

Mass Mail

Mass Mail is ingenious. The user writing the email starts by writing one email that should be send out to all recipients. This includes the title, body and possible attachments. Then all recipients are added to that email in the appropriate fields. A click on the Mass Mail button (available under File > Mass Mail) will now create individual emails for each email recipient and put them in the outbox of the email client. Each recipient will therefor get an individual email message so that no other email addresses appear in the mail header.

Personal Mail

One problem of the Mass Mail approach is that the emails cannot address the individual. Adding Hej Frank to a mass mail would send that greeting to all other recipients as well. That’s where Personal Mail comes into play. Personal Mail makes use of variables and csv files to address individuals in mass mailings. Variables can be added to any field in the email in the form {{Variable}}. It is for instance possible to write an email like the following:

To: {{Mail}}
Subject: {{ID}}: Notification
Body: Hi {{Name}}, this email …

The selection of File > Personal Mail after writing the email will open a dialog with the mandatory option to load a csv file containing the information. The developer does not describe how the csv should look like and I was not able to figure it out on my own. Users who would like to make use of that feature might want to contact the developer directly. The email address is published at the Mozilla Thunderbird page of the add-on. Mail Merge is compatible with both Thunderbird 2 and 3 and can be downloaded from the official Mozilla website.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Saturday November 7, 2009 -
Tags:mass mail, thunderbird, thunderbird add-on, thunderbird extension

Responses so far:

1. Jon says:

   May 26, 2011 at 10:04 pm

   Can you help me get a hold of the developer of this add-on? I have an issue I can seem to resolve or find anywhere on the web that will tell me how to resolve…

   I am having issues with the personal mail feature:
   When I add images to the body of the email they come back as broken when received by the recipient.

   Any ideas?
   Jon

   Reply