On 6/30/06 3:40 PM  John Delacour  [log in to unmask]  said:

> Mail used to have its own Scripts menu
> but they removed it when they realised that nobody had yet managed to
> write a useful script for Mail.

Well I can't say the script I'm writing is useful because I was trying to
work around another shortcoming in Mail in that you can't create rules to
work on sent mail. You can do that with Entourage, maybe others.

This law firm wants a copy of all email sent by their attorneys to be
forwarded to a secretary who will print it and put a copy in the file. They
used to use Entourage until they put in a mail server and had troubles with
it. Then they switched to Mail. They are beginning to rue the day they made
that switch. Anyway, I created a script that basically made a new email and
formatted it to look like a forwarded email it and then flagged the message
so that it doesn't get sent again.

So you're probably thinking if I'm creating and sending a new message rather
than forwarding an existing message doesn't that create a new sent message
in the sent folder with basically the same content? Well the answer in Mail
is maybe and sometimes but I don't know why. Oddly, when creating and
sending an email with the AppleScript I developed you might not see these
messages show up in the sent folder. However, since these scripts are run
once a day first thing in the morning any new sent mail appears unflagged at
the top of the Sent folder and can be easily deleted by hand. Did I mention
I couldn't get the "delete" command to work on these new sent messages? Well
that's hard to work on when they don't always show up anyway.

The script I created seemed to be working fine until it ran into an email
with an attachment. I would just like to have a reference to the attachment
in the existing email and so that I can attach it the new email. I just
don't see how the hell you can do that with this product. However with Mail
it's never just one problem to solve. Rather, any attempt at scripting Mail
seems to devolve into a complete and total morass of negativity. In this
case the script, when attempting to get the content of any email that has an
attachment also, for reasons I don't understand, truncates that content
seemingly at random points.

There may be workarounds to these issues that someone may be aware of and/or
I might not be working with the scripting of Mail correctly. However, it's
easier to move on to another product rather than face the uncertainty of
this product and there's no doubt that this is an unfinished product. No
reason to use it.

-Duane Mitchell