Automatically print attachments from Mail

Oct 10, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ryanhunt

Having spent hours scouring the Internet for someone who had already solved the problem of how to automatically print attachments from Apple Mail, I found no answers. In my case, the reason I wanted to do this is that I get my faxes sent to my email from an online fax service. I currently use Send2Fax.com, but have used eFax in the past. The faxes are sent to a separate email account I have set up specifically to receive faxes. I then have to open the message, open the attachment, and print. Very redundant. My laziness demanded an easier way.

Here's what I wound up doing to solve the problem:

  1. Created a folder for my faxes: ~/Faxes
  2. Control-clicked on the folder to enable folder actions as explained here.
  3. Saved this script in ~/Library » Scripts » Folder Actions. This is a script that I modified from the OS X folder action script named Image - Duplicate as JPEG.scpt, which you can find on your Mac in the /Library » Scripts » Folder Action Scripts folder.
  4. Attached the above script to the folder using the above instructions.
  5. Saved this script in ~/Library » Scripts » Applications » Mail. This is the script that I modified from this source.
  6. In Apple's Mail, I created a rule, set to "All conditions met," with these criteria:
At this point, everything worked for me. If you need more help with the process, this entry on my blog contains a more detailed version of the above.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one. The information above was taken from the linked blog post, though I have reformatted and rewritten pieces of it for easier reading here.]

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