We intend to test Librem Phone in our company. However, we cannot find if it supports mail-merge. So, is it possible to personalize our email for each recipient? Like when the message is sent, Librem Mail or any other service will merge our email with data from our mailing list, so that each recipient receives a personalized email just for them. This and some other apps like Invoice apps and a pdf editor combined with the monitor bundle can completely replace most of our Computers.
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LibreOffice supports mail merge and sending a document as an email. See this guy’s solution:
You can write a macro to automate the process.
For PDF editors, see:
Of course, this assumes that you are using your Librem 5 as a PC, and convergence might not be ready on release date.
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Yes, the main question here is for us, does it work on the phone?
And another thing is, using 3 different applications to run mail merge is a pain and doing so is even more time-consuming on the phone. Is there a way to do it just from the mail application?
Ofc noone can right now tell you what will run on the phone. But there are indications:
- Does it run on the dev kit? very probable that it works
- Do you find it as debian package compiled for arm64? will probable work as a desktop variant, but probably not optimized for mobile usage
E.g. I can find libre office as arm64 debian package: https://packages.debian.org/buster/arm64/libreoffice/download
I don’t know with which linux-mail-program you are currently using mail merge. But if it’s FLOSS you will most probably also find it as a debian package.
E.g. you can also find Thunderbird as arm64: https://packages.debian.org/buster/thunderbird
https://packages.debian.org/buster/geary (which I think will be the one ported?)
You could google if one of them or the one you currently use supports mail-merge and are supported by arm64
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The applications will run on the Librem 5, but their interfaces haven’t been adapted for a 5.7 inch screen. It is hard to answer your question without knowing what you are trying to do.
I assume what you want is to be able to write the text for the mail merge template on your phone and then do the mail merge to generate PDF files and then email out the PDF files to a list of email addresses.
Of course, there is no specialty app just for what you want, but you can create a script that sends a text file to LibreOffice to convert it to ODT, then runs a macro to do the mail merge and saves the files as PDFs and then sends each of them in an email.
You will have to write a macro in LibreOffice and a small Bash script, but it isn’t that hard. Then, your users can edit the template file using any text editor, like gEdit. Let’s say that you name your Bash script “emm” (email mail merge). Then your users could type in a terminal:
emm <your-template-file.txt>
and it would do the rest.
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Based on what I saw in the development videos, it seems like you can run any Linux software on it. I’m not an expert though. If my hunch is correct, Thunderbird and an add-on will solve that problem if you get the desktop kits.
How to : Mail Merge with Thunderbird on Windows
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