Plugins

Geary 3.38 and later supports optional plugins that you can enable to extend its features. To see which plugins are available, open the app menu, click Preferences, then click Plugins.

Built-in plugins

The following built-in plugins are available:

Sent Sound: Plays a sound when and email is sent. Note that your desktop preferences must have System Sounds un-muted for it to be heard.
Email Templates: Creates a Templates folder which allows you to create re-usable email templates.
Mail Merge: Uses Templates containing special merge fields in the text to send multiple email messages using a CSV file.

Messaging Menu: Enables integration with the Ubuntu Unity desktop's messaging menu.

Mail Merge

The mail merge plugin allows you easily send a customised email based on a template to multiple people at once. It is useful for sending newsletters and other mass-mailouts on a small scale - somewhere up to 500 or 1000 messages at once.

Important: Sending large volumes of email can be interpreted as sending spam and your email provider may disable or cancel your email account for doing so. Always check their policy regarding sending bulk email and ensure your mail-outs comply with it.

To get started, enable the Mail Merge plugin: Open the app menu, click Preferences, then click Plugins, and ensure the Mail Merge plugin is enabled. Then follow these steps:

1. Create a mail merge template

Create a template email that contains "merge fields" – keywords surrounded by double braces, for example: {{email}}. These keywords are used to look up replacement text in your merge data file.

Try it out:

Select the Templates folder, then click the New button in the folder's info bar.
- In the To line enter {{email}}
- In the Subject line, enter Test mail merge
- In the email body, enter Hello {{name}}, welcome to our newsletter!
Click the save button in the composer's header bar.

2. Create a merge data file

Merge data files contains the text that is used to replace the merge fields in a merge template. These are plain text files in the comma-separated value (CSV) format. You can produce them using a plain text editor such as Text Editor, spreadsheet software such as Libre Office Calc, or more advanced software such as databases.

An example of a merge data file is:

name,email
Alice,alice@example.com
Bob,bob@example.com
Charlie,charlie@example.net

The first line of the merge data file must contain a list of keywords, at least one for each of the keywords specified as merge fields in the mail merge template. For example, if your merge template contains the field {{email}}, then that must appear as a field in the first line of the merge data file for it. The example above has both name and email keywords, making it suitable for the example merge template we created in the last step.

Each subsequent line is used to generate a customised email by filling in the template. For example, if you have a merge data file containing 11 lines, the first will be the list of keywords, and the remaining 10 will be used t generate 10 different customised email messages. The example above will generate three email messages.

The merge data file must be comma-separated, using double quotes ("Smith, Chris") for fields that contain special characters and saved in the UTF-8 encoding. These correspond to the default export options for LibreOffice Calc.

Try it out:

Open Text Editor
Copy and paste the example above into the empty window so it appears exactly as above
Save it as geary-mail-merge-test.csv

3. Merge the template

Finally, you can merge a template with a data file by selecting the merge template email in the Templates folder, then clicking on the Merge button in the email's info bar. A file chooser is presented, allowing you to select the merge data file to use for it.

After selecting the data file, a new Mail Merge folder will be created, and filled in with an email for each email row in the merge data file. You can examine the merged email to check for problems, and start and pause sending using the button in the folder's info bar.

Note: Geary currently limits sending mail merges to 30 messages per minute to reduce the chance that your account is disabled by your email provider.

You can use the same merge template multiple times with different merge data files, you can also use the same merge data file with multiple templates.

Try it out:

Click on the template you created above in the Templates folder, then click Merge on the email's info bar.
Select the geary-mail-merge-test.csv data file you just created, then click Merge to select it.
The Mail Merge folder opens, containing three email messages – one for each of the email rows in the data file.

Developing Plugins

Currently, Geary supports plugins written in Vala, included and distributed with Geary project itself. We welcome contributions of plugins that would be generally useful for people using Geary.

A future version of Geary will support plugins written in Python and that are installable in your home directory.

For the plugin API and examples, see the src/client/plugins directory in the source tree.