Mail Act-On: Invoke Mail.app rules with custom commands

Submitted by Merlin on June 13, 2005 - 7:24am.

Mail Act-On 1.3 - Key Stroke Plugin for Apple Mail.App

If you’re using Tiger and Mail.app, you need to have a look at Mail Act-On, a free plugin developed by Scott Morrison and Jonathan Paisley that lets you assign keyboard commands that are bound to custom “Rules” you set in your Preferences. This is (very cleverly) accomplished by naming the rule according to the CTRL key you want to assign to it.

A simple, but elegant application I use constantly—I’ve created a rule called “Act-On: a | Archive” with this basic logic:

Move Message to: archived
Mark as Read
Stop evaluating rules

So I can select a bunch of already-read messages in my inbox, hit CTRL-a, and it silently shunts the old mail off to the archive without dragging. Done.

Scott points out that—with a logical mind and a bit of creativity—you can do all sorts of cool tricks—including using the same key for different commands based on context. My favorite trick is to just hit “`” (reassignable to the meta key of your choice), which brings up a bezel showing all possible commands for the selected messages.

If you were a fan of Aaron’s “Mail.app Mutt Scripts” for Panther, you should deﬁnitely check out Mail Act-On. Really wonderful little plugin and a huge time-saver.