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I've made a change to my workflow recently and now I find that I frequently need to forward various emails to a specific other recipient.

This isn't something that I can easily do with normal Mail.app rules because deciding whether the email falls into this category or not is something I do 'by hand' - it's context and time sensitive etc.

I was hoping I could have some kind of custom toolbar button (or possibly keyboard shortcut I guess) that would simply forward the currently highlighted email to this other person. To clarify - the other person would be 'hard-coded' - if it was just a case of forwarding a mail to anyone then I'd press shift-apple-f then type the person's address. I'm looking to get this down to a mouse-click/keystroke or two at most. :-)

Anyone seen anything that would let me customise Mail.app this way?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can add a script that runs from the applescript menu, but AFAIK you can't customise the toolbar itself.

To enable the applescript menu you can use the applescript utility.

You then add your script aliases to the user/Library/Scripts/Applications folder

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Thanks - this has led me nicely into writing Applescript. It's quite a bit different to VBScript! :-) –  robsoft Jul 24 '09 at 7:22
yep the syntax is a bit strange to be honest .. tell application .... –  Bruce McLeod Jul 24 '09 at 9:48
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Update : I'll leave Bruce's suggestion as the accepted answer but I found a better way to do this from my own point of view.

First up, it seems there's a bug in Mail these days which means it's hard to redirect a selected message. I found lots of Google evidence of people trying to do this kind of thing and getting nowhere. I'm sure there's a way, and I'd love to see Applescript from someone which really does redirect the selected message to a hard-coded address, under Leopard.

But I digress.

I got hold of a copy of Mail Act-On which isn't free (but it's hardly expensive). It allows you to set-up manual keyboard activation of rules. Which rules get processed is up to you, and you can quite quickly (like, within 2 minutes of installing) figure out how it works. I set it up so that I had a new 'keyboard' rule such that when I pressed Ctrl-N the selected email was immediately redirected to a hard-coded address (that of my colleague).


What's even sweeter about this is that it's a doddle to set-up more of these - so now I can have similar hard-coded redirects and activities for several different people/types of email.

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