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Announce new messages in Entourage Apps
This may be useful for people using Entourage. I have entourage set up to filter all of my mail into specific mailboxes. Everything left over is generally "personal". However, with lots of list messages coming in, it's sort of nice to know a bit more about these "personal" messages. Here's an applescript which will read who a message is from and the subject of the message for every message that the filter catches.
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"

-- get the currently selected message or messages
set selectedMessages to current messages
repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages

-- get the information from the message,
-- and store it in variables
set theName to sender of theMessage
set theName to display name of theName
set theSubject to subject of theMessage

say "new message from"
say theName
say "regarding "
say theSubject

end repeat
end tell
Enter the script using Script Editor, found in /Applications -> AppleScript.
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Announce new messages in Entourage | 5 comments | Create New Account
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The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Apple Mail
Authored by: bih on Sep 25, '02 01:06:01PM

Can I do this with Mail.app?



[ Reply to This | # ]
Apple Mail
Authored by: falkaholic on Sep 25, '02 01:24:58PM

doesn't look like it.

no rules can run applescripts.



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Apple Mail
Authored by: Angostura on Sep 26, '02 04:59:28AM

Sadly not, I don't think. One of the mail rule actions that Entourage provides is 'IF X run AppleScript Y'

There is no equivalent run AppleScript action in Mail.app



[ Reply to This | # ]
small enhancement
Authored by: hayne on Sep 25, '02 02:20:39PM

I found that the announcing was quite useful when Entourage was in the background, but was annoying when it was the frontmost application since the whole application seems to stop until the speech is over - I have to wait for the announcement to finish before I can continue doing anything with the program.
So I changed my version of the applescript to have the following as the first line after the 'tell':
if frontmost then return -- don't announce if Entourage is frontmost



[ Reply to This | # ]
alternate script version
Authored by: slacker on Sep 27, '02 08:34:20AM

Been a while since I did any applescripting (the last time was on an SE30 I think). This version goes through Inbox and reads off headers of unread messages. Paste text below into script editor and save into "~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items" folder. To automatically launch automatically within Entourage, go to Tools/Schedules. Select "Send and Receive All". Click "Add Action". Pull down "Run Applescript" and browse to the file you just saved.

(*
Speak Mail
*)

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
if frontmost then return
set theCount to unread message count of folder "Inbox" as text
if theCount is "0" then return
say "Hello, you have"
say theCount
say "messages."

set newMessages to messages of folder "Inbox"
repeat with theMessage in newMessages
-- get the information from the message,
-- and store it in variables
if the read status of theMessage is untouched then
set theName to sender of theMessage
set theName to display name of theName
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
say "from"
say theName
say "regarding "
say theSubject
end if
end repeat
end tell



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