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Archive for January, 2015

Automatically Prepare Email (Mail, OS X): Sender, Recipient, GPG Encryption Checked

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Sometimes, I enjoy doing something that does not belong to my core area of expertise, at first glance. Still it is fun to figure out how something works 😉

Here is the “problem” I decided to address: – frequently, I send emails to “recipient_x_”. – The content of these messages should be encoded via pgp. I use gpg tools, which I like because their seamless integration into apple mail. Depsite this seamlessness, I have to click on a button to tell mail to encrypt the message, every time I want to send an email. Granted, I could encrypt by default, but among my typical recipients, the ones that use pgp are in the minority. And yes, I am still using apple mail, despite some interesting new kids on the block (MailMate at the forefront). I do use the add-ons mail tags and mail act on though. – I want to send this email from a particular email account

These tasks seems to be ideal for automation, I must have captured the macpowerusers bug. Typically I do most of my scripting with python. I dislike solutions that are bound to something specific like a given operating system. Despite recent discussions about the state of the mac, I don’t foresee myself to be using anything else in the near future. Hence, I started looking into automator, which has a few mail related tasks available, such as selecting the account. However, it has no way to automate gpg.

The next step was to look into applescript. I’ve looked a bit into it in the past, when I created latex based pdfs as notes for omni outliner. Generally, an applescript can be associated with a keyboard shortcut. Keyboard maestro, which I own since a little while, offers similar functionality, with improved user-friendliness. So now, when I am in mail, I just have to type cmd - opt - E, the script is executed, and I get a window as shown below. The three areas highlighted by red rectangles are adapted according to variables in the script.

Email
Template of an email draft generated with the applescript. Fields marked with a red rectangle are filled by executing the script.

Feel free to check out my script on github.

Written by Claus

January 11th, 2015 at 6:35 pm

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