Minimailer

Minimailer is a small script to send automated emails.

It's feeded from a template file and from a CSV data file, sending one email per CSV row after applying substitutions according to template rules that matches the data columns.

Dependencies

Minimailer has minimal dependencies:

• Python 3.
• A sendmail-compatible program (defaults to msmtp).

It was successfully tested in Debian but should run in other systems without problems.

Installation

Minimailer can live anywhere in your $PATH or run directly from the repository.

You can also install Minimailer from PyPI using

pip install minimailer

Basic usage

Minimailer only needs two parameters, the template and the data filenames:

minimailer message.tmpl data.csv

CSV file format

• Minimailer uses the first row in the CSV file as field names.
• All other rows are considered as data.
• There are no constraints about which or how many fields can be used.
• The only requirement is that one of those fields should be used as the email address source.
• By default, the field named email is used for email addresses, and can be overriden by the --recipient-field-address option.

Template file format

Minimailer relies in Python 3's str.format() syntax, meaning that any text file can be used as long as:

1. Template variables are enclosed in curly braces like {this}.
2. It implements a valid email message, i.e, it's compatible if the format specified by RFC 2822.

Advanced usage

Minimailer also comes with optional parameters allowing things such as handling email addresses in a custom contact field as indicated above:

minimailer message.tmpl data.csv --recipient-field-address 'contact'

Or using a custom sendmail invocation (in this case, msmtp with the account name my-account):

minimailer message.tmpl data.csv --sendmail-command 'msmtp -a my-account'

Check minimailer --help for details and more invocation options.

Examples

Check the following files for examples in how to structure your template file and data source:

• Data source example.
• Email template example.