TLDR: Mutt and simple scripting.
> mutt -s "email subject" "recipent@whatever.com" < "message.html" in a loop.
Had to send unhealthy amount of emails. Was surprised that sending same email to
a list of adresses is not a common feature in email-clients. Small journey.
Although there are e-mail marketing platforms online, felt like it would be an overkill. All I need is to loop through 150 emails and send same formatted text to all, one by one.
The tool
The candidates were NodeMailer and
Mutt. I have Node.js at my day job, so had to select
Mutt. How to set-up Your mutt, You can read on
Medium
or someone’s personal
blog. The only
part those tutorials not covered, is how to send formatted text. It turned out
to be easy, just add set content_type="text/html" to .muttrc file,
otherwise it will be plain text only.
The email-message
The e-mail text istelf should be saved as html file. For My “spamming” purposes
I have been using zohomail, which allows to see the generated
html of the message I have created, so copy to file, and no need to touch CSS.
gmail has show original on reveived or sent messages.
Some fancy text with formatting like this:
Becomes a HTML like:
<div>
<br>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 2;">
<span class="size" style="font-size: 18.666666666666664px">
Fancy email with
<span class="colour" style="color:#00cc00">
</span>
<span class="highlight" style="background-color:#e5ccff">
<span class="colour" style="color:#00cc00">
colors
</span>
</span>
<br>
</span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 2;">
<span class="size" style="font-size: 18.666666666666664px">
<span class="highlight" style="background-color:#ffffff">
and
</span>
custom line-spacing
<br>
</span>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 2;">
<span class="size" style="font-size: 18.666666666666664px">
Regards.
</span>
</div>
Saving it to message.html. (Yes, font-size looks odd)
The loop
Need a script to read file with recipients test-list.csv. Keeping it simple, just one tab,
no header row, and no empty lines. For every line, script would call mutt with
correct arguments.
Almost ready script existed on the internet,
took it and added mutt call line.
#! /bin/bash
arr_csv=()
while IFS= read -r line
do
arr_csv+=("$line")
done < test-list.csv
echo "Sending emails to selected list:"
index=0
for email in "${arr_csv[@]}"
do
echo "Sending emai to: $email"
mutt -s "test subject" $email < message.html
sleep 5
((index++))
done
Saving it to send-in-loop.sh
Email list
test-list.csv - the file with recipients, adding just 2 of my emails
> cat test-list.csv
dmi.al.ch@gmail.com
dmi.al.ch@zohomail.eu
Recap
All files message.html, test-list.csv and send-in-loop.sh should be in one
folder.
> ls -1
message.html
send-in-loop.sh
test-list.csv
Such a fancy output of ls command, mystic argument 1 does this.
Now all that is left is to call the script by
> bash send-in-loop.sh
Sending emails to selected list:
Sending email to: dmi.al.ch@gmail.com
Sending email to: dmi.al.ch@zohomail.eu
And received email looks same as expected:
Precautions
Need to have that sleep 5 in bash script otherwise email provider will block You.
At least I gotten a temporary block on 10th email.
Which is another reason to set up own email server, that is actually not a
straightforward task, so later.