Naively, it seems to me that the thing to do here is to mention something about the person's work. I would dislike someone saying they went to the same univers

Naively, it seems to me that the thing to do here is to mention something about the person's work. I would dislike someone saying they went to the same university as me, because I don't care - I recognise that others differ, but to me, it seems fake and try-hard. But I would like something like "your $project on github is interesting", or "I liked your blog post about". (Attempting to fake this can go wrong. I've had emails that said things like "we were impressed by your github portfolio, particularly in Python and C", which sounds spammy because you could easily generate that by scraping Github, and I barely use C.) You know your job better than me, but that's how I would think to avoid seeming either too spammy or too chummy.