Apple Mail Hack: Move Message To Sent Folder

In the year that has elapsed since I failed to explain why I was using PINE for email, I’ve switched to Apple Mail.

Well, it’s been alright, but much to my regret the improved latency due to keystrokes only traveling around my local machine – instead of through the interweb and back as was the case with PINE on a remote machine – makes it almost justifiable. Almost. Apple Mail makes it really easy to delete messages. You just press the “Delete” button. Poof.

Apple Mail, however, makes it a lot more difficult to SAVE messages. You have to go to the “Message” menu, then select “Move To”, then select the mailbox you want to save it in. Or use the mouse to drag-and-drop it into your mailbox of choice. But this is not acceptable as using the mouse depletes one’s indie cred even more than simply using a GUI mail client in the first place.

So, armed with James Eagan’s article on writing mailbundles I wrote a hack which adds a menu item, complete with keyboard shortcut, allowing the user to easily and quickly file one or more messages away in the “Sent” folder (*). See here:

Move to Sent Menu Screenshot

(*) Since switching to Apple Mail – and having access to its nifty and swift full-text search capabilities – I’ve abandoned the thousand-or-so individual folders in which I used to file things away. Mail in my Inbox now goes to one of two destinations: Trash, for spam and automatic notifications and other stuff I have no interest in ever looking at again, or Sent, for anything written by a human and on occasion important things written by computers.

Download MoveMessageToSentFolder-1.0.zip. Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) only.

To install:

  • Copy the mailbundle to ~/Library/Mail/Bundles. Create this folder if it doesn’t already exist.
  • Open Terminal and run the following commands to enable mailbundle support:
    defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
    defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3
    

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.