Aral Balkan has written a clever applescript that makes it possible for mail.app to reply to multiple emails.

By default you can’t do this. If you select multiple emails in the Mail Viewer, the Reply and Reply All buttons in the Toolbar grey out.

Aral’s script, based on a previous example posted on macOSXHints.com, saves time and effort by giving you the power to respond to a bunch of emails about a similar problem in one hit; especially useful if you have been on an extended break at the beach and have returned to an inbox heaving with emails.

Copy the text of Aral’s script , paste it into Script Editor, compile it and save it somewhere clever like ~/Library/Scripts/ Applications/Mail so that it is always at the top of the AppleScript menu when Mail is the active app.

Then select all the emails you received about new cutting edge “Getting Things Done” (GTD) apps that knock every other previous GTD app into a cocked hat, or how frustrating it is that the background of emails in Mail.app can’t be changed or whatever, and run the script.

Mail produces a new message addressed to you with all the senders of the original emails in the BCC field:

Promise to check out all the new GTD apps right away, hit send and suddenly your inbox is fifteen emails smaller.

For extra-speedy multiple replies, you could bind the script to a Quicksilver trigger or use a utility like FastScripts to bind it to a keyboard shortcut of your choosing.

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Greg Welch has tweaked his two Mail plugins, MailRecent and MailFollowUp, to make them Leopard-friendly and to introduce general improvements.

MailRecent (see the earlier Hawk Wings review post) is a quick filing plugin that lives in Mail.app’s Contextual menu. If you are not using Mail Act-on it offers a fast way to file messages into your most frequently used mailboxes, without the hassle of dragging them across to the Mailbox list.

The screenshot on the right shows it in action.

The version released today only runs on Leopard, although a Tiger Mail version is still available on Greg’s web site.

It is now “case-insensitive”, that is, it now lists mailboxes in alphabetical order whether they begin with a capital or lower case letter. Finally, he has added an uninstaller to the disk image, for easy removal.

MailRecent is freeware and is available from Greg’s web site .

MailFollowUp provides a clever tweak to the way Mail handles the carbon copying of emails to a group of recipients.

The new version (1.2), like MailRecent, only runs on Leopard. It too gets an uninstaller and has improved the logic of the replies even more. As Greg puts it, MailFollowUp is now “faster, smoother, and eliminates the occasional addition of the original sender to the To header”

Several localisations have also been improved.

MailFollowUp is also freeware and is available from Greg’s web site .

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Greg Welch has updated his MailFollowup plugin. (See an earlier Hawk Wings post for more information on how this plugin can make your conversations smarter.)

He has added a toolbar icon, smarter handling of multiple email accounts, new and nice install options and reworked the logic for formulating replies.

The toolbar icon can be added through the Customizise panel:

(It looks a little out of place here because I have stripped out the icon “lozenges”. Normally it looks just fine.)

People with multiple accounts will be glad to hear that the plugin now automatically identifies which account the original was sent to and uses the same account to compose the reply.

Greg, who looks rather too well-dressed to be a developer, has also worked hard on the installer.

It now lists the names of all your other installed plugins, offers to do a complete backup your Mail folder and preferences to your Desktop and warns you if the bundle compatibility is incorrectly set.

Last of all, he has changed the logic on how the replies create cc and/or bcc for the original and/or followup sender. Some additional unusual cases are handled better, and the overall process is faster.

MailFollowup is freeware and available from Greg’s web site .

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Greg Welch has updated MailFollowup, his “smarter reply” plugin, for Apple Mail.

This plugin adds a “Followup” command to Apple Mail’s Message and Contextual Menus, so that the To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses appear in the reply exactly as they appeared in the original message. By default, Mail places only the original sender in the To: field of the reply and dumps everyone else into the Cc: field.

The updated version is smarter about when to include the original sender. Duplicate cc’ing has been eliminated by only including the original sender if the Followup sender is not the original sender.

MailFollowup is freeware and is available from Greg’s web site .

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MailTemplate, a useful plugin for Mail.app that provides pre-written new message or reply templates for frequently-needed emails, has been updated.

The new version (1.6) brings integration with Mac OS X’s Address Book, adding drag and drop support for Mail’s To:, Cc: and Bcc: fields.

Attachments are handled more cleverly. The update adds drag and drop support to its attachments pane, includes a delete key to remove attachments and has unified the message editor and attachments panes.

MailTemplate is shareware (USD 14.95) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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On the Apple Discussion Boards, Steve Jones notes that Mail.app has the annoying habit of adding an extra return to paragraphs quoted in a reply.

It doesn’t happen all the time, and it seems to happen whether the reply is in plain text or rich text format.

I’ve noticed this myself and have shared the concern of another poster in the same thread:

I hope my original messages aren’t being displayed to the recipient like this, ’cause it’d really make me look like an idiot!

This is possibly not the most pressing issue facing a user of Mail.app, but it does nag away in the back of my mind.

Why is it so? Can anything be done to fix it?

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