mailmerge and email of a protected document

I know the standard answer is "mailmerge and document protection is mutually exclusive", but...

I have a template I am distributing that has some cells of its table available for editing. Protection with exceptions is perfect. However, this distrubuted template is a newsletter which I prefer to email via mailmerge to protect the list of email addresses. Anyone know of a way to do this? Is there a way to make the email addresses somehow exceptions? Can I keep the doc unprotected but lock the uneditable cells? I'm up for thinking outside the box. Thanks in advance for the help.