If necessary, you can do it int he shell. You could probably dump the list of 
email addresses to a text file (or parse thunderbird's addressbook directly 
in the shell), then run it through awk (or eqivalent - to add the text of the 
letter), and pipe it to mail. 

Whether it's worth it depends on how many you want to send.  

Jeremy

On Saturday 04 August 2007 9:46 am, Jeremy Rosengren wrote:
> Jon Schewe wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 22:24 -0500, Jeremy Rosengren wrote:
> >> Jon Schewe wrote:
> >>> Perhaps someone on this list has tried to do this.  I have a list of
> >>> people in my address book and I would like to email them all a message,
> >>> but I want it to be personalized, like it would be if you used the mail
> >>> merge feature of many word processors to print out personalized
> >>> letters. Does anyone know if this is possible with Thunderbird or how
> >>> to do it?
> >>>
> >>> I'm thinking that I would write something like this:
> >>>
> >>> To: %email
> >>> Subject: Renewal time for services
> >>> Dear %name,
> >>> Would you like to renew your service?
> >>>
> >>> Than point Thunderbird at this and my email list and generate an email
> >>> for each person.
> >>
> >> Something like this?  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8238
> >
> > Like that, but sending emails, rather than saving files or printing to a
> > printer.
>
> Google says there's nothing available like that for Thunderbird (and we
> obviously always trust what Google says...)
>
> You could probably use OpenOffice to generate the form letters as text
> files and use a glue script to send out the batch of emails after
> they're generated.
>
> As I was typing that last sentence, I thought of another search to try
> and came up with this:
> http://internet.cybermesa.com/~aaron_w/OOo_email_merge/OOo_email_merge.html
>
> -- j
>
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