Introduction to mailmerge

Mail merge from R using markdown documents and gmail.

• Parse markdown documents as the body of email
• Use the yaml header to specify the subject line of the email
• Use glue to replace {} tags
• Preview the email in the RStudio viewer pane
• Send email (or saving as draft) using gmailr

Note: Right now, the only supported email back end is gmailr (see https://gmailr.r-lib.org/).

Construct a data frame with the content you want to merge into your email:

dat <-  data.frame(
  email      = c("friend@example.com", "foe@example.com"),
  first_name = c("friend", "foe"),
  thing      = c("something good", "something bad"),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

Write the text of your email as a R markdown document. You can add the subject line in the yaml header. Use {} braces inside the email to refer to the data inside your data frame. Expressions inside these braces will be encoded by the glue::glue_data() function (See https://glue.tidyverse.org/).

msg <- '
---
subject: "**Hello, {first_name}**"
---

Hi, **{first_name}**

I am writing to tell you about **{thing}**.

{if (first_name == "friend") "Regards" else ""}


Me
'

Then you can use mail_merge() to embed the content of your data frame into the email message. By default the email will be shown in a preview window (in the RStudio viewer pane, if you use RStudio).

To send the message, use send = "draft" (to save in your gmail drafts folder) or send = "immediately" to send the mail immediately.

library(mailmerge)
library(gmailr, quietly = TRUE, warn.conflicts = FALSE)

if (interactive()) {
  # Note: you should always authenticate. The 'interactive()` condition only 
  # prevents execution on the CRAN servers
  gm_auth()
}

dat %>% 
  mail_merge(msg)
#> Sent preview to viewer

if (interactive()) {
  dat %>%
    mail_merge(msg) %>%
    print()
}