Over the weekend I discovered a quick tip for emailing an open document in Mail.app.

Office for Mac apps have a “Send to…” option in their File menu, but many other apps don’t, including the ones that you use everyday.

If you want to email a PDF that you are looking at in Preview or a document you are working on in Mellel , all you have to do is drag the small icon in the titlebar onto Mail’s icon in the Dock after holding down the mouse button for a tiny bit while the cursor is over the icon:

A new message appears with the file attached.

It’s even more efficient than using Quicksilver to email a file quickly.

UPDATE: As Adam points out in the comments, this also works with Word and other Office apps, in fact with any app that shows you an icon in the titlebar.

[Thanks, Dan ]

Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, document, email, file, mail.app, Productivity

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Quicksilver promotes itself with the tag, “Everything is an Easter egg”. There’s a surprise behind every keystroke.

I was surprised a few months ago when I discovered how easy it is to email a file directly from the Quicksilver interface.

And, of course, it’s just as easy to select an Address Book contact and fire up an email message to them in Mail.app with a few Quicksilver keystrokes.

But other email clients and interfaces get good loving from Quicksilver too.

Quicksilver and Gmail

A new Quicksilver plugin for Gmail was released today.

Coelomic at WordWorks has produced an excellent tutorial for Gmailers who “would rather die than use Mail in OS X” on how to use the plugin.

Detailed and lavishly screenshotted, it shows you how to compose and address an email inside Quicksilver that will load into Gmail’s web interface.

Gmail and Thunderbird

Hawk Wings reader and prolific commenter, Ted Pavlic, posted the keystroke sequence to begin an email in Thunderbird from the Quicksilver interface. Let me save you the leg work:

Set Thunderbird as your default e-mail app, hit Control-Space, type in a name from your address book, tab over, type “Compose,” and Thunderbird will pop up in a compose window with that e-mail address.

The comma trick works too. Control-Space, name, comma, name, comma, name, comma, …, tab, compose, and Thunderbird will pop up an e-mail addressed to each of those address book entries.

Of course, this isn’t really “Thunderbird support” in Quicksilver.

Quicksilver can begin a message in any email client that you can set as the default in the General tab of Mail.app’s preferences. Even PowerMail.

Tags: email, file, GMAIL, mail.app, plugin, Preferences, quicksilver, thunderbird, web interface

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Like most people, I mainly use Quicksilver as an app launcher or to display phone numbers from Address Book quickly. But I have recently learnt a new trick - mailing a file to someone from Quicksilver - which is a real timesaver.

For this tip to work you need to have the Apple Mail plugin for Quicksilver installed and the “Email Item… (Send Directly)” option activated in the actions tab of Quicksilver’s preferences. You might also like to move that action up the list towards the top. It’s second in my list as emailing files is now, after opening them, the second most common thing I do.

1. Activate the Quicksilver interface with its keyboard shortcut
2. Type the first few words of the file you want to email.
3. Select it when it appears or scroll down until you find it. Hit the Tab key to move to the next window in the bezel.
4. Hit the “Down arrow” to open the drop-down box of available actions. Select “Email Item…. (Send Directly)”. Hit the Tab Key.
5. In the third window type the first few letters of the recipient’s name. Select the right one. You should now see something like this:
   
6. Hit Return. Off it goes as an attachment!

I once got myself down to five seconds for this sequence. Mostly it takes longer but it still pays off for those times when i just need to send a file.

The latest version of Quicksilver also has an “Email Options” tab in the Preferences which allows you to tweak the settings for the subject of the email and the default message that goes with the attachment.

Tags: Address Book, email, file, mail plugin, quicksilver

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