Re: using templates to write articles (email)

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> is there some sort of support built into gnus for writing articles
> (email) from templates? Such templates would contain either headers or a
> body, or a combination of both.
>
> So far, I´ve created templates as plain text files, and when writing an
> email from the template, I delete everything in the composing buffer and
> do an insert-file to read the template into the buffer. This works fine,
> and perhaps there´s some support for templates already built in, which
> would make using templates more convenient?

I don't know of anything built in, but I wrote the following function to
do something like a mail merge. It's very primitive, but could serve as
the basis for what you need.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defun my-mail-merge (names buffer subject from marker)
  "This is a bit of a mess, but it's something like a mail merge.

Variable containing names should be a list of two-element lists,
in the format (\"Name\" \"email address\")."
  (interactive "XVariable containing names: \nbBuffer to slurp: \nsSubject: \nsFrom: \nsMarker: ")
  (dolist (n names)
    (compose-mail (nth 1 n)		; to address
		  subject
		  `(("From" . ,from))  ; all other headers
		  nil nil nil nil)	; don't remember
    (insert-buffer-substring (get-buffer buffer))
    (message-goto-body)
    (perform-replace marker (nth 0 n) nil nil nil) ; insert name
    (message-send-and-exit)))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

"marker" here is basically just something like XXXXX, that gets replaced
with the name. The logical next step would be to have it read data from
a file instead of a variable, and then have the top line of the file set
the markers for each field, like so:

{{name}},{{salutation}},{{email}}
John Doe,Dear,j.doe@gmail.com

Then use those markers in a template, and have the call to
perform-replace loop once for each marker.

Hope that provides food for thought,

Eric