Send Individual Thank You Emails
Discover how to automate sending personalized thank you emails in Ruby by designing data structures, using external gems, managing string substitution, and configuring SMTP settings for email delivery.
Problem
Jessica had a birthday party and received gifts from friends. She'll now send each of her friends a personalized email thanking them. Instead of sending the emails one by one, she wants a program to send emails to each of her friends by running a single command.
Her email looks like this:
Dear Angela,Thank you for coming to my 12th birthday party,I really like the gift you gave me: Cat Statue, thank you very much!Jessica.
A list of people with their emails and gifts she received is given below:
first_name | gift | |
Pokkle | pokkle@example.com | Bow and arrows |
Angela | catlover@example.com | Cat statue |
Tonpa | tonpa@example.com | Juice machine |
Toby | tobytoby123@example.com | Necklace |
Biscuit | biskykruger@example.com | Blue jewel |
Mito | auntiemito@example.com | Cook book |
Kate | katiecat@example.com | Whale poster |
Renee | renee@example.com | Camera |
Chloe | chloe@example.com | Pencil case |
Kelly | kellyisarabbit1@example.com | Rabbit ears |
Melody | melody.456@example.com | CD |
Purpose
Create a custom template file for substitution
Work with a complex data structure
Use external Ruby library (gem)
Send emails
Use chain of string substitution
Analyze
Custom template creation
This exercise requires more complex data structures and several new concepts. By examining the sample email, we see three differences among the emails to be sent:
Recipient’s email address (in the email header)
Recipient’s first name
The gift brought by the recipient
Therefore, we need to design a data structure to pass all the above data (for each person) to the template to generate one email. Think about using data structures like ...