Boldly Open

10 Responses to “Poor man’s mail merge in Apple Mail”

1. 1 Michael Kreppein
   Sep 13th, 2008 at 9:28 pm

   Gianugo,

   What perfect timing! I was looking to do this exact thing in Apple Mail and your post was at the top of the search list. THANK YOU!

   The one addition to your script I’d love to see is the ability add a unique salutation. For instance, if the text file of email addresses looked like:
   Michael, email@email.com
   Gianugo, email2@email2.com

   Then the body of the email could be:

   Dear XXXX,

   Where XXXX is replaced by Michael for the first email and Gianugo for the second email.

   I know Iknow, you offered up something for free and now someone wants to you add their feature. But I do think it’d be a useful feature for all.

   Thanks,
   Michael

2. 2 Michael McCrystal
   Sep 30th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

   I’m running into an error and was hoping you’ve already seen it and found a work around. When I run the script it works fantastic, however, it is messing with the message text. The start of the message looks like this”

   “{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf949\cocoasubrtf350
   {\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
   {\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
   {\info
   {\author Michael J. McCrystal}
   {\*\copyright Copryright 2006 Michael J. McCrystal }}\margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
   \pard\tx720\tx1440\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\tx5040\tx5760\tx6480\tx7200\tx7920\tx8640\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural

   \f0\fs24 \cf0 Hey Everyone,\”

   Have I done something wrong in the process?

   Thanks so much for dreaming this up. I’ve been looking for a good way to do this for a long time.

3. 3 Michael McCrystal
   Sep 30th, 2008 at 12:56 pm

   I found the answer almost as soon as I posted the question. I had saved my email text as RTF and not as a text file.

   Thank you again for working through this.

4. 4 Eugene Kurz
   Dec 17th, 2008 at 8:55 am

   Hello. I’m wondering if there’s a way to reconfigure this script to mail contents of a web page from Safari.

   Any thoughts?

   Thanks,
   Eugene

5. 5 Robert patterson
   Jan 27th, 2009 at 6:59 am

   Awesome work, any idea on how to add an attachment? and how to I set BCC account.
   Much obliged.

   Robert

6. 6 Marco Antoniotti
   Apr 15th, 2009 at 9:53 pm

   Sei un genio…..

7. 7 Graham Kirby
   Nov 11th, 2009 at 12:06 am

   Here’s a tweaked version that allows you to select a signature to use, formats the message as plaintext, and does some simple personalisation.

   If an entry in the address file has the format

   firstname lastname

   then the message body will begin “Dear firstname”.

   Graham

   ———

   (* Copyright 2008 Gianugo Rabellino – http://boldlyopen.com
   This snippet is licensed under the Apache License version 2.0
   see http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html *)

   tell application “Mail” to set allAccounts to name of every account
   choose from list allAccounts with title “Choose the Mail account to use…”
   set theAccount to result as string

   tell application “Mail” to set allSignatures to name of every signature
   choose from list allSignatures with title “Choose the signature to use…”
   set theSignatureName to result as string

   set subjectDialog to display dialog ¬
   “Enter the subject of the email to send” default answer “no subject”
   set theSubject to text returned of subjectDialog

   set sendOrPreview to the button returned of ¬
   (display dialog ¬
   “Send the messages right away or preview and send manually?” with title ¬
   “Send or Preview?” with icon caution ¬
   buttons {“Preview”, “Send”} ¬
   default button 1)

   set theText to (choose file with prompt “Pick a text file containing the email text”)

   set messageBody to read theText

   tell application “Finder”
   set addresses to paragraphs of ¬
   (read (choose file with prompt “Pick a text file containing email addresses, one by line”))
   end tell

   set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to space

   tell application “Mail”
   activate
   set activeAccount to account theAccount
   repeat with i from 1 to (the length of addresses)

   set target to item i of addresses
   set targetWords to every text item of target

   if (the length of targetWords) > 1 then
   set forename to first word of target
   set theContent to “Dear ” & forename & return & return & messageBody
   else
   set theContent to messageBody
   end if

   set newMessage to make new outgoing message ¬
   with properties {account:activeAccount, subject:theSubject, content:theContent}

   set message signature of newMessage to signature theSignatureName of application “Mail”

   tell newMessage
   set sender to ¬
   ((full name of activeAccount & ” “)
   make new to recipient at end of to recipients ¬
   with properties {address:(a reference to target)}
   set visible to true
   end tell

   – Set to plaintext
   – From http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2009/09/12/12380.html
   tell application “System Events”
   tell application process “Mail”
   set frontmost to true
   end tell
   keystroke “T” using {command down, shift down}
   end tell

   if sendOrPreview is equal to “Send” then
   send newMessage
   end if
   end repeat
   end tell

8. 8 Graham Kirby
   Nov 11th, 2009 at 12:09 am

   Sorry, problem with previous posting, probably with HTML encoding of angle brackets.

   Intro should read:

   If an entry in the address file has the format

   firstname lastname <emailaddress>

9. 9 Sarah alawami
   Mar 14th, 2010 at 10:33 pm

   I grabbed the script and pasted it int eh mail application folder where the mail scripts are stored. I chose my account but not sure what to do from there. any help would be appreciated. I’d love to see this work.

1. 1 Scrivo a chi voglio con AppleScript « Macworld Online
   Pingback on Jan 26th, 2010 at 6:12 pm

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