Hawk Wings » attachments

Attaché: Script for smarter attachments

Tim Gaden — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:32:06 +0000

Some people are unhappy with the way Mail.app truncates the names of attachments so that you can’t quite see at a glance what you are clicking on.

They think, in turn, that it’s discourteous to do this to others.

Attaché is the utility for them. It is an AppleScript that provides full information in the body of the email for all enclosed attachments.

Put it in your Dock or on your Desktop (or wherever you can find it easily).

Drop some emails on the applet and it packages them up so that it’s clear at once what the recipient is getting:

The applet allows you to set a number of default parameters.

Open up the app and you are greeted with a Preferences pane that let’s you specify a default language (English, German, French, Italian).

I’ve blogged this before, but the author has now added additional preferences. You can now set the account that Mail will use to compose the message and pick a default signature.

Further options allow you to set a default subject and to import text to form the default body of the message.

This will appeal especially to knowledge workers (like me) who spend a lot of time shunting documents and whatnot around from one place to another, although others who want or need to identify attachments more closely in their emails will like it too.

Attaché is freeware. It was created by Martin Michel, who hopes soon to add the ability to zip files dropped on the applet and to set default recipients. It is available from its own page on MacScripter.

mail.app, apple mail, attachments, full text, productivity, civility, applescriptSimilar Posts:

Lock up Leopard Mail in three easy steps

Tim Gaden — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:16:34 +0000

On Apple Discussions Martin Marconcini has discovered a way to bring Mail.app to a screaming halt in three easy steps.

Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signaturesSimilar Posts:

Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin gets smarter

Tim Gaden — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:57:22 +0000

Loki Software has released an updated version of its Mail Attachments Iconizer plugin for Mail.app, an add-on that offers much greater control over the way that attachments are displayed and packaged.

I could type out all the benefits which the plugin offers, but thankfully the developers have knocked up their own chart of improvements:

The new version adds some welcome features — a new option to always display full attachment names, the ability to images in HTML layouts of incoming messages in LEopard Mail, the printing of attachments according to how they are currently displayed on the screen and better recognition of images without filename extension.

It also offers a more reliable fix of interaction with the stationery feature in Leopard Mail.

Mail Attachments Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99) is available from the developer’s web site .plugins, leopard mail, apple mail, mail.app, attachments, productivitySimilar Posts:

Leopard Mail’s drag-n-drop double act (with MailTags)

Tim Gaden — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:15:22 +0000

Like many people (but apparently not all), when I drag an item from the Finder to Mail.app’s Dock icon, it launches two messages, the first without the attachment, the second one with it.

Obviously, this is annoying and I have always regarded it as just that. However, today, a poster on the Apple Discussion Forums points out an even more annoying aspect of this new “feature” in Leopard Mail:

If I drag a file from Finder to Mail icon in Dock, Mail opens and creates two windows. I write my message in the window in front.

Then I get interrupted, and when I come back I need to write another message to a different recipient before I complete the first message. I use the second window for this message (convenient as it is already there…) I place a different file in this message and send it. My first message window then disappears!

Fine, I think – IÂ´ll write it again. Only, it turns out that the recipient of my SECOND message received the FIRST message, including attachment and everything written in the body area (not in subject area). I work with clients for whom discretion is important – this is risky as sensitive information can end up in the wrong places!!!

Hmmmm… Maybe it is a good idea to use the Attachment button in the Toolbar until this one gets fixed.

UPDATE: Johann suggests in the comments that this is a MailTags problem. Testing — the kind of testing that one should do before pushing out a blog post — clearly demonstrates that it is (for me anyway), based on a statistical sample of one. But Scott knows about it, which means that will probably be fixed even before this update is posted!

UPDATED UPDATE: The controversy continues. The original poster and many others claim that they get this behaviour without MailTags installed. Follow it blow by blow in the Apple Discussions.

UP-TO-DATEST UPDATE: Glenn posts in the comments that this is a bug in Leopard Mail and quotes Apple’s response to his submission of a bug report:

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5630858. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 5243377.

leopard mail, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, bugsSimilar Posts:

Leopard Mail’s stupid save attachments button

Tim Gaden — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:05:40 +0000

Pierre Igot takes aim at the behaviour of the Save button in Leopard Mail, with the rigour and vigour which are his trademarks.

In Tiger Mail, he points out, you could click on the button to bring up a â€œSave Asâ€¦â€ dialog that offered a location for saving all the attachments in the message.

In Leopard Mail, however, you need to click-and-hold on the button in order to bring up an enhanced contextual menu with more options for individual attachments.

He calls this a bug rather than an improvement:

The simple and most obvious option, which is a single click on the button, no longer worksâ€”which does not make sense, because the buttonâ€™s visual appearance suggests both a regular button that responds to a single click (like the â€œQuick Lookâ€ button next to it) and a button that brings up a pop-up menu (with the triangle). Besides, the tool tip clearly suggests that the button should respond to a simple click as well.

I’ve had more than one email from users who thought that the button was broken, because it did nothing when they clicked it., so Pierre is not alone.

Head over to Betalogue and read the whole piece. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, tiger mail, bugs, attachments, button, counterintuitive or what?Similar Posts:

Mail Attachment Iconizer updated, Leopard ready

Tim Gaden — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:38:53 +0000

Adam Nohejl at Lokiware has updated his plugin which manages the way Apple Mail displays attachments.

As well as redesigning the plugin so that offers better control of how attachments are handled, he has also tweaked it for Leopard.

Mail Attachment Iconizer 2.0 offers several improvements over Mail.app’s native attachment handling. It offers particular advantages for people who often receive large PDF or PostScript files:

Using the new Preference Pane in Mail’s Preferences, you can determine exactly how attachments will behave. For example, you could choose to see PDFs inline, but Bitmap images as icons, or vice-versa:

You can also opt to set the content so that the recipient of your email sees it in the way you want.

Mail Attachment Iconizer is shareware (USD 14.99, discounts for owners of MAI 1.0) and is available from Adam’s web site attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, pdf, icons, productivitySimilar Posts:

Attaché: Droplet for quick Mail.app attachment lists

Tim Gaden — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:31:14 +0000

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 .mail.app, apple mail, attachments, applescript, droplet, productivity, quickly batch and send, listsSimilar Posts:

A modest Leopard Mail wish-list

Tim Gaden — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:52:03 +0000

Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “Iâ€™m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be.”

He has produced a list of gripes and a modest list of wishes for Leopard Mail.

I see what he means when he asks for more flexible searching:

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

It would be great at the click of a Finder-like plus sign to search for emails from a particular sender with a particular word in the subject line:

That’s much easier than the Boolean search “hack” for Mail.

The complaint about smart mailboxes is also right on target. And well-observed; I’d not noticed it before.

When you create a smart mailbox and select “message is in mailbox” you get a list of your existing smart mailboxes. When you try to create a “message is not in mailbox” criterion, you don’t. Why not? He wants it fixed.

His modest feature requests — an iLife media browser and the automatic compression of multiple attachments — are not what I would choose, but it’s great to see someone thinking outside the box and coming up with features that add functionality not just eye-candy.

A fine post.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, leopard mail, smart mailboxes, searching, media browswer, attachmentsSimilar Posts:

A list of scandalous problems with Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 00:20:08 +0000

The owner of rtfa.net has posted a list of the things that are annoying, broken or just plain scandalous about Mail.app.

He is an unhappy Apple Mail user: “Well, if Thunderbird integrated with spotlight and OSX address book, itâ€™d be a no-brainer. However, Iâ€™m entrenched.”

And life in the trenches with Mail.app is not good.

Three problems score the highest scandal rating — incorrect treatment of IMAP’s “seen flag”, the “lost message” problem and the â€œinvalid pointerâ€ problem.mail.app apple mail, bugs, problems, IMAP, flags, attachments, SSL, encryption, lost messagesSimilar Posts:

Extracting winmail.dat files in Mail.app

Tim Gaden — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 08:14:21 +0000

Apple has updated its technote on dealing with winmail.dat files.

After pointing out that winmail.dat files the result of emails containing rich text information sent “from a Microsoft email application (such as Outlook and the Microsoft Exchange Client)”, the technote advises:

To avoid seeing these attachments in the future, you ask the sender to deselect the email’s “Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format” checkbox or preference setting in mail client before they send the message.

Fortunately more immediate help is at hand.

OMiC is a plugin that can extract the files from a winmal.dat attachment on the fly. Since I last posted about it, it has got smarter.

It no longer uses the Save dialog, but decodes and presents the included files in Mail’s Attachment View:

It also now supports Panther (10.3), winmail.dat files with the wrong MIME type and Outlook’s iCalendar format.

It’s the kind of functionality that should be built-in to Mail.app but isn’t.

OMiC is shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30) and is available from the developer’s web site . If you live in a Windows world, the money will be well worth it.mail.app, apple mail. winmail.dat, outlook, attachments, microsoft exchange, tips, pluginsSimilar Posts: