Drafter

Drafter does command-line mail merge-- it programmatically generates Gmail drafts for you, complete with subject lines, cc and bcc fields, and more.

Drafter does not automatically send email for you. It generates drafts for you in Gmail, allowing you to review and approve each email before you send it out.

Drafter builds HTML and plain-text email based on simple Mustache templates and are written in Markdown. Fields like the subject line, cc, and bcc are specified using YAML (and Mustache tags can be used anywhere).

Here's an example of a simple email template:

---
to: {{recipient}}
subject: {{first_name}}, come to my birthday party this weekend!
---
Hey {{firstname}}, just a heads up, my birthday is coming up and I'd love for
you to be there. Make sure to bring {{significant_other}}!
- Joe

To generate Gmail drafts, create a CSV file with the headers recipient, first_name and significant_other and all the contacts you'd like to email, and just run:

python drafter.py --template /path/to/template.markdown --csv-data /path/to/data.csv

Drafter will then log in to your Gmail accout and create a set of drafts based on your template and CSV data.

Drafter setup

Start by installing the required libraries:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then set up some configuration details for Drafter by copying config.example.yaml to config.yaml:

cp config.example.yaml config.yaml

Edit the configuration to include your Gmail OAuth token and login details.

Creating an OAuth token for Gmail

Before you can use Drafter, you have to generate a personal API key for Gmail.

Use Google's xoauth.py module (included) to generate tokens for accessing your account via OAuth:

python xoauth.py --generate_oauth_token --user=youremail@gmail.com

After following the steps the script provides, you'll get a URL to obtain a verification code. Paste this code into the script and it will provide your token and secret key. Include these in config.yaml, along with your email address.