PAW MailMerge

Create a Privacy-sensitive, email-provider-Agnostic, Web-based Mail Merge solution.

Mail Merge is a popular feature for word processors (and email clients) since the 1980s that allows you to generate and send personalized communication to multiple people using a template and a spreadsheet. In this project you will create a Mail Merge solution that works with any email provider, is privacy-sensitive and is web-based and uses a CSV instead of a spreadsheet.

Objectives

Create a web-application that does not require a sign up, is privacy sensitive, is accessible (i.e. allows navigation & use without requiring a mouse), is focused on facilitating the task of mail merge:

Basics:

  • A web-based interface where one can compose a template that uses fields from a CSV that the user will upload.
  • Combine the data from the CSV and the template to generate the multiple emails that can be either displayed on new tabs or downloaded in plain text format.
  • The web app shouldn't require any signup or login and should not save any data from the user on the server (saving data temporarily for the session is ok)
  • The interface should be clean and focused on the task of composition of template, uploading the file and creating merged mails that can be seen individually in new tabs or downloaded.

Bonus points:

  • Allow rich text editing in the template composition - Font, font-size, bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists, 
  • Smart templates that change sentences based on the data (e.g. Use the sentence “These are the products you are currently using" when there are multiple products a customer has signed up for vs “This is the product you are currently using” when there is only product the customer has signed up for.)
  • An option that allows the generated mail text and templates to be saved in the user's browser so that they can be retrieved when the user comes back to the app.
  • Allow generated mails to be downloaded in PDF format.

The project source code must be licensed under Apache License 2.0 and made available on GitHub.

Motivations

While Office has this feature, it requires the Desktop apps for Word to be installed, which is not available if you are using Linux or a Chromebook. There are third party solutions and addons on the Office store but they are either tightly integrated with Microsoft products (and thus can't be used with Gmail or other email providers) or require payment. Although clients like Thunderbird have add-ons that do that, you need to be using Thunderbird to be actually doing that.

There are command line solutions but they require time, energy and know-how and setup and you can't use them from any computer.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:
  • Know basics of HTML,CSS, JavaScript
  • Comfortable with any one web technology framework (e.g. Flask, Django, NodeJS)

Preferred Qualifications:
None Listed


Details

Project Partner:

Samarendra Hedaoo

NDA/IPA:

No Agreement Required

Number Groups:

2

Project Status:

Accepting Applicants

Keywords:
WebPythonWebweb-based
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