GMail Sender

This is a utility to send multiple emails through GMail

Installation Steps

1. Make sure that you have python and pip installed in your machine. Enure that python is in your system path so that you are able to invoke python from command line
2. Download or clone this repo. To download, click on the Code button at the top and choose Download ZIP. Save it to a folder and unzip
3. Open a terminal and move to the foler where you extracted the zip files. You should see a file named send.py
4. You need to install the required packages. You can do this by running pip install -r requirements.txt from this folder
5. You can run the application using python send.py <arguments>

Features

This application is a no frills utility to send mass emails through your personal GMail account. The following features are supported

• Sending multiple emails from a list provided in a CSV file
• Supports both text and HTML content
• Use a template HTML file for the body of the email. The HTML file can link to external images
• Provide a Subject for the emails
• Customise the email body for each recipient as provided in the CSV
• Speed up the sending of the emails by sending them in parallel using multiprocessing

Note the following limitations

• GMail may rate limit your account if you send too many mails in a rapid burst
• GMail does not provide any error message when the email failed to deliver. So this utility will return success whether the mail got delivered or not

Instructions for usage

Preparing GMail Credentials

Before you can start using this application you need to generate an application specific password for your GMail account. You can get this by visiting this help article and following the instructions there Remember the application password which you generate since it can be viewed only once

Preparing Fiels

You need two files to run the utility

• A CSV which contains the list of recipients
• An HTML or text file containing the body of the email

To prepare the CSV, you can use the template.csv file in the root folder. Copy the file into a new file and add the recipient information. Make sure that the first row is not altered in any way

To prepare the HTML or text file, first create your template file. The utility allows you to customise the mail for each recipient by dynamically changing the following

• Title (Mr., Ms., Dr. etc.)
• First name
• Middle name
• Last name
• Full name (If this is provided, the other parts of name will be ignored. If this is omitted, it will be constructed from the parts of name if required to be filled in the template)
• Suffix (MD, IPS etc.) To use the customisation, edit your html file to mark the locations which should be dynamically filled using the information from the CSV. You can do this by adding the placeholder string according to the table below. Make sure that the curly braces - "{" and "}" are not omitted and there is a space before and after the curly braces

Field	Place holder
Title	%%name_prefix%%
First name	%%first_name%%
Middle name	%%middle_name%%
Last name	%%last_name%%
Full name	%%full_name%%
Suffix	%%name_suffix%%

Sending emails

You can run the utility by running the script send.py. The usage information is as below. You can see the same message by running python send.py --help

usage: send.py [-h] -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD -f FILENAME [-t TEMPLATE] -s
               SUBJECT [-e ERROR_FILE] [--format FORMAT] [-v] [-vv] [-b]

Send multiple emails with GMail

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -u USERNAME, --username USERNAME
                        Username to use to send the emails
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        Application password. Get from https://support.google.
                        com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en
  -f FILENAME, --filename FILENAME
                        CSV file with the the list of recipients
  -t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
                        Email template to use
  -s SUBJECT, --subject SUBJECT
                        Subject of the email
  -e ERROR_FILE, --error_file ERROR_FILE
                        File to store recipients which failed
  --format FORMAT       Format of the email. Should be either "html" or "text"
  -v                    Verbose output
  -vv                   Very verbose output. Debug information will be printed
  -b, --background      Set this flag to send multiple messages parallely