I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have wanted to email a file directly from Finder.

Someone asks you for a paper or document you’ve written (or a graphic or a spreadsheet or whatever). You have to go to Finder, track it down and then you have to drag it from the window into an email message that you opened earlier. Not any more! An automator workflow makes it easy.

1. Download the workflow, kindly provided by Peter Hudson, from AutomatorWorld.

2. Copy the file “Attach to Mail.workflow” to your ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder folder. (You may have to create a new folder called “Finder” in the ~/Library/Workflows/Applications folder, if it doesn’t already exist)

3. All done. Now when you find the file in Finder that you want to mail, right click (or Control click) on it, and select the “Attach to Mail” option from the Automator submenu in the contextual menu.

4. Mail (or whatever program you make your default mail client in Apple Mail’s preferences) will open up a new message with the file attached.

…although as Dan Warne points out, it is just as easy to drag-n-drop the file onto the Mail icon in the Dock. In fact, on my powerbook, it is actually quicker to do it that way.

This never, ever occurred to me before. Still, I maintain that the Automator workflow tip above will prove a very useful one for the 2-3% of Apple users who keep their Dock hidden in order to save desktop space. ;-)

Similar Posts:

• Pictures, PDFs and Mail: More Automator Goodness
• A plug-in for emailing files from Finder
• Automator Action to email files quickly
• Supercharging Mail’s workflow with Automator
• Automator actions for Mail.app

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 8th September, 2005 at 8:31 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.