jinjamails

This is a small tool to send personalized emails based on a recipients.json file and a markdown template, providing some metadata in a yaml header.

Install

Use

pip install https://github.com/pep-dortmund/personalized-emails/archive/v0.1.0.tar.gz

Running the program

To send the mails, do

jinjamails /path/to/template.md /path/to/recipients.json [options]

Recipients

Recipients are currently read from a json file like this:

[
  {"firstname": "John", "lastname": "Doe", "email": "[email protected]"},
  {"firstname": "Jane", "lastname": "Doe", "email": "[email protected]"}
]

These are the required fields to send an email. You can add more, which you can then use in the templates.

We plan to support more database / file types.

Writing a template

This tool uses markdown with the jinja2 templating language. One record of the recipient database is passed to the template as recipient.

To access an element, you can use:

{{ recipient.firstname }}

For more possibilities, have a look into the jinja2 docs.

metadata: subject, author, ...

Metadata is given in a yaml header on top of the template:

---
subject: My first try with personalized email
author: me
author_email: [email protected]
---

You also have access to the metadate in the templates, e.g. using

Cheers
{{ metadata.author }}

Add attachments

Use the attachments meta tag to add attachments:

---
subject: My first try with personalized email
author: me
author_email: [email protected]
attachments: 
    - /path/to/attachment
---

Mail server configuration

We currently support two backends:

• smtp via the python standard library modules smtplib and email
• mailgun via requests

The tool will look for a config.cfg or you set the path of the configfile using the -c /path/to/config/file option.

If no backend is specified via the -b command line option, the first backend found in the config file is used.

smtp

If you want to use smtplib, put this into your config file:

[smtplib]
host: ...
port: ...
user: ...

You can also provide a password, if not, you will be asked for it.

Mailgun

If you want to use mailgun, put this into your config file:

[mailgun]
domain: ...
authkey: ...