Alfred-MailTo

A Workflow for Alfred 2.

Quickly select recipients from your Mac’s Contacts database and send
them to your email client of choice. Also works with
Groups/Distribution Lists.


Contents

Download and installation

You can install MailTo either from GitHub releases
or the Packal website.

Install by double-clicking MailTo.alfredworkflow.

Usage

Note: The first time you run MailTo, you will probably be asked to
grant access to your Contacts. Obviously enough, if you refuse access,
MailTo won’t work.

Quickstart

Use the @ keyword in Alfred to access MailTo and search your Mac’s
Address Book.

Recipients will be suggested from matching contacts and groups in the
accounts configured in your Contacts
database.

Hit ⇥ to autocomplete the recipient list from the selected result, or
↩ or ⌘+NUM to add the address to the recipient list and start
composing a mail.

You can add multiple recipients by adding a comma between them.

Use mailto to view/change settings.

All options

Email clients

In theory, any email client should work, as MailTo uses a
mailto: URI to call your email client.

In practice, support for mailto: varies widely between clients.
Pretty much any client will accept a URI containing only email
addresses, but many choke if the URI also contains recipients' names,
e.g. Bob Jones <bob.jones@example.com> instead of just
bob.jones@example.com.

MailTo knows how to handle all the clients listed below and will
automatically fall back to email addresses only if the client is known
to choke on names.

If your email weapon-of-choice isn’t working properly, try forcing
MailTo to use email addresses only (enter mailto in Alfred and toggle
Format to Email Only in MailTo the Configuration), and file a bug
report or submit a pull request if
you’ve got it working yourself.

Supported email clients

The following email clients currently work “out of the box”:

Unsupported clients

The following do not work:

Other clients

Anything not listed above hasn’t been tested because I don’t own a copy
to test with.

If your client doesn’t work with the default settings, you can try your
hand at adding rules for that client by editing the client_rules.json
file in MailTo’s data directory. To access the file, open the
configuration options with mailto and select Edit Client Formatting Rules. client_rules.json will be revealed in Finder.

The file is well documented, and you can try different combinations of
options to see if you can find one that works with your client. If you
do, please share them in a GitHub issue or pull
request (add the configuration to the default
client_rules.json in the src directory). A sample configuration
looks like this (this is the default configuration for
MailMate):

{
    "com.freron.MailMate": {
        "spaces": true,
        "names": true,
        "mime": false,
        "no_commas": false,
        "inline_to": false
    },
    // other apps here
    // ...
}

Note: To configure an app, you must use its bundle ID, not its name
(i.e. com.freron.MailMate, not MailMate).

You can use MailTo’s configuration screen to get the bundle ID of an
application:

  1. Use mailto to bring up the configuration menu, and choose
    Email Client: …. This will display a list off all compatible apps
    on your system.
  2. Search or scroll down the list to select the app you want.
  3. Hold ⌘ to display its bundle ID as the subtitle or press ⌘+C
    to copy the bundle ID to the pasteboard. ⌘+L will also display the
    bundle ID in Alfred’s Large Text window.

Alternatively, you can use the following command in Terminal to get the
bundle ID of an application:

mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -raw /Applications/MailMate.app
# com.freron.MailMate

Supported account types

MailTo uses the official Address Book API to read your
contacts.

The following account types are definitely supported:

I don’t know about any other account types, as I don’t have any to test
with…

Please let me know if you have a different kind of account,
e.g. Exchange or LDAP, and whether or not it works.

Google Contacts

Groups are currently not synced properly between Google accounts and
Contacts.app. Groups created in Contacts.app in a Google account become
a single, empty contact in your Google Contacts; groups in Google
Contacts are ignored by Contacts.app.

This is a limitation of the Contacts.app–Google Contacts integration,
not of MailTo.

Miscellany

Configuring groups and distribution lists

You can use groups in your Contacts database as mailing lists/distribution
lists. When you add a contact to a group, their primary email address will
be used when you send an email to that group (the primary email is the one
listed first in Contacts.app).

If you’d like to change the email address associated with a group, open
Contacts.app and select the Edit > Edit Distribution List… menu item:

Select the group you’d like to edit from the list on the left and then
click on the email addresses you’d like to associate with the group:

In this example, I’ve associated Jürgen’s versuchgroup@example.com
email address with the group. If you watch the demo animation,
you can see that when I send an email to Test Group, that’s the
address that’s used for Jürgen.

Fluid apps

Fluid is an application that turns web applications into
native applications. It generates so-called “single-session browsers”,
which are basically browser apps designed to visit only one website.

By default, all Fluid-generated apps can handle mailto: URIs (and
will show up in MailTo’s list of email clients), but only via Gmail
(which is pre-configured by Fluid).

To add a different webmail service, first you need to figure out the
URL to send the email address(es) to.

Roundcube webmail

For a Roundcube installation, it would be something like:

https://mail.example.com/?_task=mail&_action=compose&to=

Once you’ve got your URL, open your Fluid app’s Preferences and go to
URL Handler Preferences. Add a new group for your webmail service and
add the pattern mailto:*. Then copy the JavaScript from the Gmail > mailto:* script box into your own mailto:* handler’s box. Finally,
change the URL in the outURLString line to your own webmail’s URL.
For a Roundcube installation, it’d look like this:

function transform(inURLString) {
        inURLString = inURLString.replace('mailto:', '');
        inURLString = inURLString.replace('&amp;', '&');

        var argStr = '';
        var splits = inURLString.split('?');

        var emailAddr = null;
        var args = {};
        if (splits.length > 0) emailAddr = splits[0];
        if (splits.length > 1) argStr = splits[1];

        var outURLString = 'https://mail.example.com/?_task=mail&_action=compose&to=' + emailAddr;

        if (argStr.length > 0) outURLString += '&' + argStr;
        return outURLString;
}

Don’t forget to deactivate (uncheck) the Gmail mailto:* script!

Updates, GitHub and Packal

MailTo has a built-in updater and will offer to update itself via
GitHub if a newer version is available.

You can turn off update notifications if you prefer (by
default, MailTo will show an update notification in your results list).

If you use the Packal Updater, you should turn off
update notifications and leave the updating to the Packal Updater. An
update notification will still be shown in the configuration screen
(keyword mailto), but it’s much easier to avoid selecting that one by
accident.

Packal adds additional metadata to the workflows it distributes to
enable updates. This metadata is missing in the GitHub version, so the
Packal Updater will no longer update MailTo for you until you reinstall
it from Packal.

Bugs, feature requests, suggestions

Please report any bugs and submit any feature requests via
GitHub issues or in the thread on the
Alfred Forum.

Thanks, licensing etc.