Re: [Evolution] Mail merge?

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> I don't use mail merge myself very often but having also come here from
> Thunderbird, and having even advised Thunderbird users to try the
> Libre/Open Office method, I am familiar with the concept and practice
> of mail merge and I am very disappointed at the response (or should I
> call it denial?) you have received here. I'm surprised that you've had
> to explain it. I'd have hoped for a response more on the lines of "we
> understand what you want, but sorry, we aren't planning on doing that."

Mail merge as a process was always a function of office, not mail,
applications. It's not something that non-business people ever do so
I'm not surprised that people are not that familiar with the concept.
It's also a complex process to get reliably correct, even dedicated
programs get it wrong. It's easy to say "how difficult is it to get a
text file and put column 1 here and column 2 there", but it always goes
further than that with conditionals and extended logic. At least with
an office application you can check before mailing out a few hundred
sheets of paper that it's correct - with email, you don't even get that
chance.

Personally, if I want to send individual messages to multiple people I
use a shell script.  If I did it very often I would look at dedicated
bulk mail programs.

> I don't think I'll be staying with Evo. Lousy printing and absolutely
> no control of fonts in sent HTML messages.

There's a new editor in the next version; you can also use external
editors if you want to do more complex formatting.

Didn't there was anything wrong with printing.

> Too many clicks to do things
> where I'm accustomed to keyboard shortcuts. 

So use keyboard shortcuts, there's plenty of them.

 Help (Alt-H) -> Contents (F1) -> Shortcut keys

P.