«
»

Sending one reply to multiple emails

AppleScriptEver needed to send just one message in reply to a number of emails? For example, four people email you about the same thing, and all of them need the same reply. Apple Mail can’t do that “out of the box”. But it can with the help of a handy AppleScript recently posted in the Apple Discussion Forum on Mail 2.0.

The process detailed by Austin Kinsella in his post here looks complicated, but it’s not. Here’s how you do it.

1. Open the AppleScript Editor (in your Applications > AppleScript folder)

2. Cut and paste (exactly!) the following text into the top box (or download a text file containing the text):

using terms from application “Mail”
on perform mail action with messages TheMail
set OldDelim to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
tell application “Mail”
set TheSenders to {}
repeat with ThisMail in TheMail
set TheSenders to TheSenders & sender of ThisMail
end repeat
set newMessage to make new outgoing message –with properties {subject:”Laboratory Marks”, content:theBody & return}
tell newMessage
set visible to true
repeat with thisOne in TheSenders
try
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to {“< "}

set TheName to text item 1 of thisOne

set TheAddress to text item 2 of thisOne

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {">“}

set TheAddress to text item 1 of TheAddress

end try
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {name:TheName, address:TheAddress}
end repeat
end tell
end tell
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to OldDelim
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

using terms from application “Mail”
on run
tell application “Mail” to set sel to selection
tell me to perform mail action with messages (sel)
end run
end using terms from

3. Click the run button to check that all the pasting went well. It will return a {“”} result in the bottom box if everything is good.

4. Click File > Save as… and save it with a title that makes sense to you (“MultipleReply.scpt” maybe?) in your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder.

5. Back to Mail (finally). Select the messages in your inbox that you want to send the one reply to. Control+click if they are not adjacent to each other, and then run the script from the script menu in the menu bar. When you click on the scroll icon, you will see it there, saved with the title you gave it.

6. Watch in amazement as the script strips out the email addresses of all the senders and places them all in the “To:” field of a reply which the script opens for you.

It looks a little daunting and time-intensive to set up, but it could save you a lot of time in the long run.

Similar Posts:

No tags for this post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 7th September, 2005 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Sending one reply to multiple emails”

  1. David Coletta says:
    September 8th, 2005 at 12:46 am

    Great tip. Unfortunately, the quotes aren’t coming through the RSS feed perfectly. I’m using NetNewsWire 2.0, and I’m seeing some of the quotes getting prepended with backslashes.

  2. Tim says:
    September 8th, 2005 at 12:58 am

    Hmmm…. Even after a refresh?

    I had the same problem in my NetNewsWire when I first posted. So I went back and stripped out the < pre > tags. The corrected RSS entry in my NNW then came out without the prepends.

    I’m too computer-illiterate to know how to fix it any other way, although I am open to suggestions :)

  3. David Coletta says:
    September 8th, 2005 at 1:15 am

    Looks like a refresh fixed the back-quotes, but some of the quotation marks are coming through as curly, which causes Script Editor to report compilation errors. I tried replacing the curly quotes with straight quotes, but got other compilation errors. I fixed those errors, but the script still doesn’t work. (I.e., with a few mail messages selected, running the script opens a mail message with no recipients.)

  4. Tim says:
    September 8th, 2005 at 1:24 am

    I’ve uploaded a text file containing the text as it works for me and updated the entry with the link. Try that. Surely that has to work.

  5. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Fastscripts: Turbocharge your AppleScripts says:
    October 6th, 2005 at 2:47 pm

    [...] When I first switched to Macs about two years, AppleScript wasn’t even on my horizon. Perhaps only Services are more neglected by switchers like me and normal users. Now I find that I am using AppleScripts more and more, both within Apple Mail (Mail Scripts, Hidden Mail, MultipleReply) and in order to integrate with Mail when I am in other apps (Feedmailer, Scale to Mail). Fastscripts helps me to do all that better. [...]

  6. Bonifacius says:
    April 13th, 2006 at 1:10 am

    Great article. I am just sad I dont know how to reply properly, though, since I want to show my appreciation like many other.

  7. Shimmy T says:
    February 1st, 2007 at 5:33 am

    Thanks heaps for the script. Can’t believe it’s not built into Mail.app!

  8. Pmatt says:
    February 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 am

    I thought this was what I was looking for, but it is not. I want to reply to multiple messages from the same person or people, and automatically quote the text from all the messages into a single new message.

    This script does not quote the original message texts, and it puts in duplicate copies of a person’s address if I am replying to more than one of their messages.

Leave a Reply