Copying Mail Contents

Questions & Suggestions
1

Hi everyone,

I am trying to copy the contents of a bill that comes in, use Regex to copy the specific cost, and then insert that into a variable. So far I am having trouble finding a way to get the content of a Mac mail message. I tried AppleScript but it's a little over my head. There is probably a slow and clunky way to do it with hotkey commands but wondering if anyone knows a way to copy the contents directly?

Thanks,
Jordan

2

This AppleScript should do the trick:

tell application "Mail"
  set {oMsg} to the selection
  
  tell oMsg
    set bodyStr to its content
  end tell
  
end tell

return bodyStr

Questions?

1 Like
3

Awesome! Works great. I even played around a little to copy it to clipboard (a big feat, I know).

The only thing is I would like to direct the bill message to a specific mailbox and have the script run when the message hits the mailbox. I know there are rules that can trigger an AppleScript, but is there a way to set the message to be copied if it is not directly selected? Tried a few things but no such luck so far.

Thank you so much for the help.

4

Please create a new topic for this request.
You can easily do that by clicking on the link icon/button at the bottom of your reply.
This will create a new topic with a lnk back to this topic.

Thanks.

5

Hey Jordan,

Unfortunately Apple broke AppleScripts in Mail Rules about 10 years ago, and they've never fixed it. (Bad Apple!)

Please take the time to complain:

Feedback - Mail - Apple

Manually processing messages in a given mailbox with AppleScript is relatively simple.

-Chris

6

Chris,

This is terrible news! Bad, bad Apple...

On the upside, after this I learned quite a bit of AppleScript and it's been really gratifying. This particular project didn't end up exactly as I wanted to but of course AppleScript has been useful in other ways.

Jordan

7

Yep.

Here's a possible workaround.

You used to be able to have a rule that worked on a per message basis, but that has been soundly broken for many years.

However – you can run an AppleScript in a rule – so you can filter all your desired mail to a process-me mailbox and then use a follow-on rule to tell Keyboard Maestro to run a macro to process those emails.

I was able to run this in a rule with no problem:

display notification "APPLESCRIPT MAIL RULE RAN!" with title "EUREKA!" sound name "Tink"

AppleScripts that run in Mail Rules must be in this folder:

~/Library/Application Scripts/com.apple.mail/

-Chris

8

Many thanks! Works well

1 Like