CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a use case here that I'd like to highlight for some desired functionality that would be very useful to us...

Sometimes we send out mail-merged emails that include complicated fields. For example, in someone's email message I may want to include the total amount they have raised with a personal campaign page associated with a given campaign, or possibly the date and amount of their most recent donation. These pieces of information exist in the database but require aggregate logic to extract, hence the CiviCRM token system has no way of representing them. I can utilize the custom search or report functionality to extract these pieces of information, and I'd like to be able to take the results of my search/report one step further by using them as tokens in CiviMail on the fly. The work-flow I envision is: (1) run search/report, (2) send mail to selected contacts, (3) insert tokens, choosing from a list of available tokens that includes columns present in the search/report.

Currently we're achieving this functionality by exporting information to a spreadsheet and then using the Open Office Mail Merge extension to send the messages through our GMail SMTP server. This approach has several obvious drawbacks: (1) complicated work-flow, (2) sending volume limitations, (3) lack of activities created in Civi, (4) lack of automated bounce processing...

Anyone else interested in having this functionality in CiviCRM? How difficult would it be to build?