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MailAnnounce Applescript App to Speak Mail Subject

I have a computer in my living room to check email and do some lite work sometimes in the evenings. As I cannot see the screen from my old school easy chair, I found myself frequently getting up to check my email when I heard that familiar new mail ding.

I found a post on MacOSXHints.com that worked through several iterations of an Applescript that could speak the sender of new mails. It is a pretty ingenious script app that spawns itself using an on idle construct to ‘listens’ for Mail.app to tell it the header information of any new mails. I cleaned up the script a bit and modified it to also say the subject.

Download: MailAnnounce.app

Instead of being annoyed by every incoming mail, I use a restrictive Mail.app rule to only run this script app on mail from certain address groups such as clients and friends and some limited use email accounts (like incoming Paypal funds ;) .

Popularity: 17% [?]

Posted in Apple / Mac, Development.

5 comments

By damonp – 4/12/2006

5 Responses

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  1. LaVern says

    For some reason when I download your Mailannounce app, OSX tries to find Classic 9X. Therefore I can not run/open this app.

    7/30/2006, 11:02 am Reply
  2. John Landerson says

    Hi, would you mind posting the source code for this. Been trying to do this myself but I’m not familiar with applescript.

    9/20/2007, 5:28 pm Reply
  3. damonp says

    Source is available

    10/9/2007, 8:51 am Reply

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » AppleScript to speak a message’s subject linked to this post on 4/14/2006

    [...] Damon Parker has taken the AppleScript referred to in an old macOSXHints post and cleaned it up , tweaking it in the process so that it will announce the subject of an incoming message as well as the sender. [...]

  2. MailAnnounce Applescript Source - damonparker.org linked to this post on 10/9/2007

    [...] have received several requests for the source of my MailAnnounce script that is able to speak the subject of mails using Mail.app and [...]



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