4/12/2006
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: 25%



April 14th, 2006 at 8:33 am
[…] 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. […]
July 30th, 2006 at 11:02 am
For some reason when I download your Mailannounce app, OSX tries to find Classic 9X. Therefore I can not run/open this app.
September 20th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Hi, would you mind posting the source code for this. Been trying to do this myself but I’m not familiar with applescript.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:49 am
[…] have received several requests for the source of my MailAnnounce script that is able to speak the subject of mails using Mail.app and […]
October 9th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Source is available