In Gmail is coming the integration with Sheets, the direct competitors of Excel in Google sauce. It may seem like a rather curious combination, but in reality it makes a lot of sense especially for more commercial purposes, or more generally for the management of any type of newsletter and content supply service to subscribers: for example, you can upload a spreadsheet containing all the email addresses of subscribers to a mailing list.
But not only: the spreadsheet could include a second column with the user’s own name associated with each address, and it will be possible to recall it in the body of the email with special commands, so that each recipient will receive a message with a minimum of customization. Of course there are other potential scenarios and tags that can be used – think for example of the date of signing up for the service. It depends a bit on the type of data collected upstream, in short.
Google highlights two major limitations: the number of rows in a spreadsheet cannot exceed 1,500, and at least for now the function is only accessible on the desktop web version of Gmail. Conceptually, the novelty completes the transition from multi-send to mail merge, a newer and more up-to-date system to manage communication paradigms to a large number of recipients. The icon dedicated to multi-send in fact disappears completely, while the mail merge icon is positioned in the upper right corner instead of in the lower toolbar.
According to initial reports, CC and BCC fields are automatically disabled when loading a spreadsheet. Also important orecchiette that each user gets in his email a personalized link to cancel his subscription.
As you can guess, this is a professional feature and as such is only available with premium subscriptions to Google Workspace. The company notes that for Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Standard and Education Plus subscribers, mail merge will be limited by default to recipients who are part of the same organization. For Business Standard and Business Plus subscribers, however, the limitation will be disabled by default. As always, it will take at least a couple of weeks for the update deployment to complete.
