Address Book/Mail interaction

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi

I’m new to AppleScript, but in an effort to get away from Entourage and use Mail/Address Book I want to learn. There are some things missing from Mail/AB that I want and as a newbie, could someone tell me what is/isn’t possible? Briefly, what I want to do is:

– Get Mail to auto-complete email addresses from nicknames in the AB
– Add people to groups from within the Mail address pane (or at least from Mail)
– A keyboard short-cut for “Edit Address Card” from within Mail address pane (am I missing this one?)
– Color labels for groups in Address book
– When one person has multiple email addresses, the ability to set the ‘default’ address so that Mail chooses that first

Any of this possible through a plug-in or something? I think there’d be a market for this kind of function.

That’s it, but in case any of this isn’t clear here’s my two biggest problems:

  1. Say I have a friend called Masaaki Suzuki who we call ‘Zuki’ for short and who uses the email zuki@zuki.com. Even if I enter ‘Zuki’ in the nickname field of the AB, Mail will NOT find it for auto-complete. It finds ‘Zuki’ in the email and the end of the name in the address pane, but that’s all. I don’t want to have two AB records (one for Masaaki Suzuki and one for Zuki), but that’s the only work around I could so far think of.

  2. Say Zuki has several email addresses including zuki@aardvark.com which he doesn’t use very much. Even if I enter “Masaaki” in Mail, Mail will auto-complete with the @aardvark address and I have to manually choose the @zuki address every time. In AB, under Edit → Edit Distribution List…, you can choose a default email for records that have multiple addresses, and Mail does get the right one if you mail to the Group as a whole, but it seems to always choose alphabetically when doing a simple auto-complete.

Sorry this was a bit long. Any help and advice to get me started would be welcome or if someone comes up with a cheap shareware script for all this, let me know! Alternatively, I’m always happy to be told how to do something I’m missing.

Thanks

#2

What version of mail are you on? When I type any part of a name in 1.3.11, I get an autocomplete of anyone with those letters contained in their name or email address. It does not consider nickname, but in the example you gave, I’d still get Masaaki Suzuki if I typed in ‘Zuki’. Check out mail 2 in tiger. It has many improvements.

Click the address book icon and you get a list of contacts. Right clicking on a name to edit the card.

If you’ve already added an address to a message, just click it to see the contextual menu with an edit option.

#3

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

I’m using Mail 2.0.1 from Tiger (10.4.1). The whole thing came up as I’m trying to use Mail rather than Entourage (once again – I’ve been through this before with Panther and gave up then too). But, auto-complete doesn’t seem to find anything but the beginning of the name. So I have to remember to type ‘Masa’ or ‘Suzu’ in my example and that’s a common name in Japan. Entourage, while more unstable than Mail, does find entries in the Nickname field. I know about the Click-search-click-choose (4 step) process to edit an address too, but in Entourage, I’d simply hit Command-= to bring up an existing entry in the Address book.

Again, I’d be delighted to discover I’m missing something obvious, but I’ve been through a lot of options on the Macfixit forum as well and no one could find anything there either.

Would any of this be fixable with a script?