Form Emails

sf0greensill

This feature request is likely to divide people along the lines of those who receive emails and those who have needed to send custom personalised emails to a lot of recipients (for a legitimate business purpose). Further more, there is the potential for abuse of this feature which must be acknowledged. This concept is similar to the form letter available in a traditional word processor, so not new.

The premise is that Vivaldi Email client would import and parse a data file: csv, yaml, json or xml. It converts fields into some basic types, like "email address", "url", "date/time", "Number", mime attachments and all the rest are string text.

To outline the way this would work. A data file is imported, the form constructor has a set of default fields, like "To", "CC", BCC" and "Subject". Then the user has the option to add their own mappings.

There are three types of functionality that may be applied to these fields:

The simplest is value insertion. Sending an email to an email address and addressing the recipient with an appropriate appellation as found in the data.
The next function is shared data, these are restricted to email addresses going in the "CC", "BCC" and attachments.
The last function is predicates. Does a data value match a condition? Regex, before or after a date/time, Number greater or lesser than.

Conditionals can:

Stop data being inserted
Exclude a text block from the final edit
Include a text block in the final edit
Exclude this recipient
Include this recipient

The finished article may be saved as a template draft to be reused with another data file.

Disclaimer: I am reticent about the ways in which this feature may be abused. The purpose of technology is to empower people and with that there is always a risk of abuse.

LonM

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