When using Mail Merge to send personalized emails, the final dialog asks us to:
- Select the column of the data source containing the email addresses,
- Enter email addresses that should receive a copy (Cc, Bcc)
- Type the subject of the email
- Select the rows of the data source that will be processed (all rows, or a specific range)
Currently, the user has to enter these details every time he clicks on the “Send Email Messages” button and this is very impractical. In practice, Mail Merge documents are templates that are reused periodically as the data source is updated (records are added to the database, or in certain workflows that are very common a different file is generated daily containing the records to be emailed for the day). Having to retype all the configuration every time impedes productivity in addition to being error prone.
LibreOffice should instead remember the last configuration inserted by the user and store it as metadata in the .odt file directly. This would be a massive quality of life improvement for users.
Also, it would be very useful if this dialog could also allow the user to optionally override the identity of the sender (Name, email address, reply-to) so that every document contains the whole Mail Merge configuration and is self-contained. Currently the identity of the Sender can only be defined in LibreOffice’s global options (Options → LibreOffice Writer → Email Mail Merge).
This makes it difficult not only to share the configuration between team members, but also to work on different documents that should show a different sender identity. For currently, for every document one needs to get into the options, modify the sender identity and restart LibreOffice to ensure that the changes are picked up. This is both tedious and error prone as one can easily forget to do so (especially since the Send Email Messages dialog does not remind us the current Sender Identity).
This configuration should be able to be set on a per document basis as well (in addition to the global option). For all these reasons I believe the proposed mechanism would be a simple and elegant way to implement this.