Mail Merge Rollout

What’s already built

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TEST Contact sheet
SPIE 2026 Presenter Contacts — all 137 conference presenters across all four SPIE Optics + Photonics sessions, one sheet per conference, downloadable straight from the Sales & Marketing dash.
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TEST Personalised template
Subject and body filled in per contact from the sheet.
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TEST Draft generation
One reviewable draft per contact. Nothing sends without a human opening it and hitting send.
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TEST Direct-send path
Optional. Shows a preview and asks yes/no before every single email goes out.

What the mail actually looks like

A real draft generated from conference_contacts.xlsx, using the reconnect_message template — one of two templates now available in the tool's dropdown (the other, wavegate_focus, stays available too).

Subject:Following up on TXServices & Wavegate

From:mckinley@mckinleyblack.com

To:pgaal@txproducts.de

Hi Peter, It was a pleasure meeting you at SPIE 2026 on 25.08.26. I really enjoyed your session on Radiation-Hardness Testing & Wavegate, I found it insightful and gave me several new perspectives. I'd love to stay in touch, as I believe there are opportunities where our expertise could complement each other and create value for both of us. I've attached a short overview of TXproducts, including our services and our flagship solution, WaveGate. If you're open to it, I'd be happy to schedule a 20–30 minute call in the coming weeks to explore potential collaboration. Best regards, Mckinley

txservices.pdfwavegate.pdf

The template behind it — message_templates/reconnect_message.txt

SUBJECT: Following up on TXServices & Wavegate

Hi {{First Name}},

It was a pleasure meeting you at {{Conference}} on {{Date Met}}.

I really enjoyed your session on {{Topic}}, I found it insightful and gave me several new perspectives.

I'd love to stay in touch, as I believe there are opportunities where our expertise could complement each other and create value for both of us.

I've attached a short overview of TXproducts, including our services and our flagship solution, WaveGate.

If you're open to it, I'd be happy to schedule a 20–30 minute call in the coming weeks to explore potential collaboration.

Best regards,

Mckinley

Signatures: it’s Mail.app, not Mailcow — won’t apply to --send

No custom HTML signature is built or embedded in the script — it only ever generates the personalised subject and body. The signature that seems to appear automatically (photo, links, DSGVO footer) turned out to be the local signature configured in the Mac’s own Mail.app, not a Mailcow server-side feature. That only inserts when composing a new message in Mail.app itself, so it won’t apply to anything sent via --send, which talks straight to SMTP. The automated send path currently goes out with no signature at all — open decision: is that acceptable, or does it need solving (script-side embedding again, or a server-side fix on the mail server)?

What we need from Web Dev this week

The prototype already speaks SMTP. It just needs real credentials and a few checks against mail.txproducts.de before it’s safe to point at actual contacts.

A dedicated app password
In Mailcow, under the mblack@txproducts.de mailbox, create an app password scoped to SMTP only — name it something identifiable, e.g. conference-mail-merge. Don’t reuse the account login password.
Confirm host & port
Expected: mail.txproducts.de, port 587 (STARTTLS) — Mailcow’s standard submission port. Just needs confirming against the real setup.
DKIM check
Confirm DKIM signing is active for txproducts.de in Mailcow. Mail without it is more likely to get flagged as spam.
SPF check
Confirm the domain’s SPF record covers Mailcow’s sending IP. Should already be true — worth a look before any real send.
Rate limit
Check the mailbox’s send-rate limit comfortably covers a burst of 20–30 emails. The script already waits a couple of seconds between sends either way.
Where it runs
For now: a laptop, run by hand, whenever there’s a batch to send. Fine for this week — flag if that should change later.
Nextcloud’s role
Nextcloud Mail is only a client UI on the same Mailcow account — there’s no separate Nextcloud-side setup to do. Just confirm that’s still true for whichever mailbox this ends up using.