How to send a transactional email manually?

Question

I have created an email with a coupon for customers. It is now in the list of the transactional email in the admin as a new layout.

Is there a way to send that transactional email manually to those customers I would like to send?

Or do transactional emails need to be sent only in a programmatic way or with an extension?

Answer 1

Loads the html file named 'custom_email_template1.html' from

app/locale/en_US/template/email/activecodeline_custom_email1.html

$emailTemplate  = Mage::getModel('core/email_template')
                        ->loadDefault('custom_email_template1');                                    

//Create an array of variables to assign to template
$emailTemplateVariables = array();
$emailTemplateVariables['myvar1'] = 'Branko';
$emailTemplateVariables['myvar2'] = 'Ajzele';
$emailTemplateVariables['myvar3'] = 'ActiveCodeline';

/**
 * The best part 🙂
 * Opens the activecodeline_custom_email1.html, throws in the variable array
 * and returns the 'parsed' content that you can use as body of email
 */
$processedTemplate = $emailTemplate->getProcessedTemplate($emailTemplateVariables);

/*
 * Or you can send the email directly,
 * note getProcessedTemplate is called inside send()
 */
$emailTemplate->send('[email protected]','John Doe', $emailTemplateVariables);

you need to add an entry to your config.xml

...

    <label>ActiveCodeline custom email module</label>
                    activecodeline_custom_email1.html
                    html

...

app/locale/en_US/template/email/activecodeline_custom_email1.html

<!--@subject ActiveCodeline custom email module @-->

Hi there {{var myvar1}} {{var myvar2}} from {{var myvar3}}. This is just some example template to test custom email module...

Source : http://inchoo.net/magento/magento-custom-emails/