This little add on has come to the rescue twice in two weeks, thought I should share it with you all. I guess I should start off by saying that I’m not a fan of Entourage. With it’s single database file and corruption issues I have pulled my hair out more than a few times trying to save people’s databases of 50,000 emails. Unfortunately it did a few things that I’m unable to recreate in Apple’s Mail program. Here are the problems I have solved so far with this handy little suite of scripts:

Problem: “I used to be able to select an email and add all the recipients to a new group contact”. We probably shouldn’t get me started on how Entourage stores its groups… but I digress…

Solution: Select the email that contains all the recipients you want in your group (shouldn’t you people be BCC’ing?). Mail Script has an option called “Add Addresses” this pops up a little window that gives you a list of everyone addressed in the email and you can click the little check boxes next to their name to include them. Now you have the option to add all the addresses as individual vCards to your address book, add to an existing group, or create a new group that contains your addresses. Next you get to select if this is their “Home”, “Work” or “other” email address. Click add and like magic you just added all the contacts.

Problem: “I used to be able to set up an email to send out at a later time”

Solution: Compose your email and save it in your draft folder. Mail Scripts has an option called “Schedule Delivery”. This pops up a window that shows you all your draft messages. you select the one you want to schedule, change the date and time and then click “Update Schedule” and then click “Done”. There is one minor glitch if you are using Leopard mail. When it tries to send the message at your scheduled time it will pop up a window saying it can’t find the smtp server (even if you only have one account and one smtp server in your settings). It shows your smtp server in a list and you just highlight it and tell it to try that one. It’s not perfect, but easier than remembering that you have to send an email out at 4pm.

Problem: “I need to be able to take my address book contacts and put them in a tab delimited file”

Solution: Along with their handy Mail Scripts they throw in some Address Book scripts. Use their Address Book “Export Addresses”. You can choose to do all contacts or one of your groups. Select your group and click “Export”. It pops up a window that allows you to choose which data you want from the cards like first name, last name, email, AIM and various other fields. I had to uncheck the “Unicode Output (UTF-16)” as it was exporting everything in an asian font and not in a correct format.

The Mail Scripts actually come with many other scripts that I haven’t found a use for yet. Have you used these scripts? If so have you found any others that have been handy for you?