Attaché: Droplet for quick Mail.app attachment lists
After watching a work colleague manually adding attachments to a Mail.app message, Martin Michel decided that there must be a better way.
And he made one. He has created Attaché, an AppleScript droplet that quickly creates an new email, with all the attachments dropped on it included and listed.
Just dump it on your Desktop (or wherever you like to keep droplets–in the Dock, perhaps). Select the files you want to send and drop them onto it.
Hey presto – an email with attachments and a list of what’s included:
If my life was full of industrial quantities of attachments, I can see how this would save a lot of time indeed.
It will also please people like Jonathan, who emailed recently with a particular attachments problem:
One thing that frustrates us is that when adding attachments the attachment name is always truncated for longer names. As we have to print a record copy of the email, and all our documents include a date at the end It is impossible to see the proper name of the email attachment. Is their a way to make it add attachment name in plain text, or not truncate?
Mail’s default behaviour is annoying. But the list that this droplet generates solves his problem. Nice!
Martin plans to add further features, zipping of the attachments, default recipients and subjects and more.
Of course, you can always drag files to the Mail icon in the Dock or use the proxy icon (as described in a recent Macworld tip 
) which is good enough for me.
Attaché is freeware and available from his web site .
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Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, attachments, droplet, lists, mail.app, Productivity, quickly batch and send
June 19th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Why not just drag attachments to the Mail icon in the dock?
June 20th, 2007 at 12:19 am
I agree with Matthew above: you can just drag attachments to the Mail icon in the dock to accomplish the same thing.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Is there any way to see attachments as icon instead of “previews” inside Mail.app?
June 20th, 2007 at 12:50 am
And there’s QuickSilver, where you select desire files, hit command+space bar (or whatever your shortcut for QS is), then Command + G, Tab, type “mail” and hit enter :)
June 20th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Matias — I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean like this?
June 20th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Still do not understand how this is in anyway different than just dragging all the attachments to the mail icon in the dock. This seems rather silly.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
That’s just what I was looking for, thanks Tim Gaden!
June 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
yeah, I agree, this is silly. I have two ways to quickly do the same thing:
1. What was listed above, just drag the file to the mail icon in the dock. Done.
2. Using pathfinder (not sure if Finder does this or not), select the file, right click, select ‘Email’ and boom, I get a new email with the file attached.
This script makes no sense to me.
June 24th, 2007 at 12:36 am
One thing this appears to add beyond just dragging to the Mail icon or an open draft message, is the “list of what’s included” in the message body. There have certainly been times for me when that text listing would have been useful, for example when I want to explain what each attachment is. It might be nice to have a ready-made list embedded in the mail, so all I have to do is add a little explanation to each.
June 24th, 2007 at 3:09 am
I’d like to see Apple implement a “storage tray” type of dialog box during the “Attach…” dialog — see a similar implementation in GarageSale, where you go to your iPhoto library and drag the images you want to attach to the Sale page into a tray of sorts.
Mail.app really should implement something like this; I often have five or six attachments in separate locations that I have to attach to an email. Sometimes I’ll drag-copy them to the desktop, select them in mail, then trash them after I’ve used them, but there has to be a more elegant way to accomplish this.