#1170 new
David Shepherdson

Feature Request: Rules/Filtering for Outgoing Messages

Reported by David Shepherdson | June 7th, 2015 @ 07:01 AM

Here's my use case: I receive mail that is sent to an alias, which forwards to me and one other person. When I reply to a message, and my reply comes 'from' that alias, I need to bcc the other person who is part of the alias. (The same thing applies if I send a new message 'from' the alias address.)

At the moment, I handle this in Apple Mail using Mail Act-On and an 'Outbox Rule', which basically says 'if the from address contains , add as a bcc address'. This happens automatically before the message is actually sent, so I don't have to do anything manual, or remember that I need to bcc the other person -- I can just reply to the message (or make a new message 'from' the alias address) and it will all just work.

I'd really like to be able to do this in MailMate, but at the moment I can't see any way to achieve this automatically; I have to remember to manually add the bcc for the other person when sending mail 'from' the alias address.

I've tried to hack something together using AppleScript (via UI scripting) or Keyboard Maestro or similar, but found it difficult to detect when the message was going 'from' the alias address.

If there was some way to tell MailMate to run a shell script (say) over the headers/contents of an outgoing message before it is sent, this would give me a way to implement the rule/filter myself -- though obviously this may be non-trivial for you to implement, so if there's some simpler way of getting to the point where I can achieve the above use case in MailMate, that would be much appreciated!

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • David Shepherdson

    David Shepherdson July 10th, 2016 @ 07:18 AM

    For reference of anybody who comes across this ticket and has a similar use case: although outgoing rules would still be a nifty feature in MailMate, I actually solved my own use case by using existing functionality in MailMate.

    When I originally raised this, I was still getting started with MailMate, and hadn't yet come across the 'message verifications' feature. What I do these days is have an entry in my ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Resources/messageVerifications.plist along the lines of:

    {
    verifications = (
        {
            title = "Other person not bcc-ed";
            details = "The other person has not been bcc-ed on this message. Are you sure you want to send it?";
            conditions = "(bcc !~[x] 'otherpersonaddress' and from.address ~ 'sharedaliasaddress')";
        }
    );
}

    This means if I'm ever sending a message from the shared/alias address, and I haven't bcc-ed the other person, MailMate will prompt me. I can then add the other person as a bcc recipient and re-send the message (and I even have some tricks using Keyboard Maestro to add the bcc entry with a keystroke when necessary).

    This completely handles my use case. While it would still be nifty to be able to define an 'outgoing' rule in MailMate so the bcc-ing happens automatically, in some ways you could say that my current solution using message verifications is more flexible, since if I ever want to send a message from the shared address without copying it to the other person, I do have that option.

  • Jon Hall

    Jon Hall October 26th, 2016 @ 07:06 AM

    My use case is that I want people to use a non-exchange address for email. Redirection isn't an option with exchange. So I want to add a Reply-to address to outgoing emails that come from my exchange address. Outgoing rules would fit the bill nicely.

    Although I could use David's solution, as far as I can see, that would mean manually the Reply-to address.

  • benny

    benny October 27th, 2016 @ 09:56 AM

    @Jon: If I understand correctly then why not just change the “From” address? Do you really want the “From” header to indicate one address and then make a reply go to another address?

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