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Using Alfred to send quick email messages

October 28th, 2013 Comments off

I’ve become a huge Alfred fan, it’s a real time saver. The Powerpack is a worthwhile upgrade as it allows you to build all kinds of quick workflows.

A workflow I use a lot is one that lets me send an out-of-band quick email message to someone. It’s incredibly convenient to be able to just hit Option-Space and type into Alfred

jim please call Mary in an hour

and have that message be sent as an email to Jim.

Here are the pieces you need to be able to do this — I assume you have Alfred and the Powerpack and know how to create workflows. Obviously customize for your own names. You will also need to have Python installed. I use Python 3 which you can download from here. Don’t forget to install it after downloading!

1) Download the zipped python script  quickmessage.py then uncompress and save it in a folder on your system. (NB I found the original version of this script on the net and modified/cleaned it up to suit my purposes)
1a) Edit that script to define your own mail hosting server, username, password etc…..same info you have specified in your regular email program.
1b) From a terminal window, go to the directory where you installed quickmessage.py and type the command chmod 755 quickmessage.py so that the script can be executed by itself.

2) Add a new workflow called Email jim with the following items in it. The contents of each block are below

2a) jim

2b) /bin/bash
Put the full path to the quickmessage.py script first. That’s the path in which you installed the python script
Replace the parameter to the -r option with the email address of the recipient
Optionally change the content of the subject line

2c) Post notification — this provides confirmation that your message was sent

3) Off you go!

 

 

 

 

 

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