Save message as PDF
Reported by Jon B. | April 4th, 2018 @ 11:44 PM
Would like to suggest a selector to save the given message as a PDF in the Downloads directory or a specified directory.
Comments and changes to this ticket
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Joseph P. Hillenburg June 19th, 2018 @ 04:10 PM
I agree. This should be offered as an alternative to the 'Print' button, and also be available in the 'File' menu. It is obviously something that can be achieved through the Mac OS X printing subsystem, but when you're looking to convert a large number of email items, that can be tedious.
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benny August 30th, 2018 @ 02:49 PM
The printing system in MailMate is somewhat primitive. I've got some notes on possible improvements and I'll add this to it.
Just for my own curiosity: Why do you need this? Dragging an email out of MailMate creates a standard
.eml
file (rfc822) which includes any attachments. Printing strips the attachments.(Sorry about the late response.)
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Jon B. August 30th, 2018 @ 02:50 PM
One keystroke (via a selector) to do something that takes several steps as you outline is generally useful for tasks that are performed frequently.
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Joseph P. Hillenburg August 30th, 2018 @ 02:55 PM
My use case is that I am sometimes sent receipts via email that I need to preserve for tax or expensing purposes. When I have to perform this task repeatedly (such as after traveling, or at the end of the year when making donations), this can become an arduous task. In this case, many of the expense reporting systems accept PDF, but a .eml would not be an appropriate storage mechanism. "Lossiness" is okay.
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benny August 30th, 2018 @ 02:55 PM
@Jon: I do get that it would be an easier way to create PDF files. I'm just curious as to what the purpose of creating the PDF files is. Strictly speaking, converting from the email format to a PDF file is a so-called lossy conversion. For archival purposes, keeping the original format seems better to me.
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benny August 30th, 2018 @ 02:58 PM
@Joseph: Ah, so you have to upload the receipts to a system which only accepts PDFs. I'm guessing you often get receipts as PDF attachments, but some times you don't and then you need to create a PDF based on the email content.
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Jon B. August 30th, 2018 @ 03:02 PM
@Benny, lots of people who are not very tech savvy prefer working with the PDF
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Joseph P. Hillenburg August 30th, 2018 @ 03:04 PM
@benny: This is true, but it's also probably better for long-term archiving of important documents. And as Jon alluded to, some of my documents are household documents which I need to share with others (such as my wife).
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benny August 30th, 2018 @ 03:09 PM
- State changed from new to accepted
@Joseph: I cannot say I agree on the archiving aspect. A lot of information is lost when generating a PDF. But thanks for sharing your use cases. Don't get me wrong, I do not oppose the feature, but it helps when I understand why anyone would use it frequently.
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Joseph P. Hillenburg May 31st, 2020 @ 02:20 PM
Hi, is there any movement on this? If you are still in disagreement, I request that you look at it from the perspective of a user (even highly technical users who have disparate uses cases.) Thanks.
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Jon B. June 6th, 2020 @ 09:37 PM
Now I can't get the print dialog to come up at all (either via ⌘P or the menu item). Dunno what's going on.
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Fabian Blechschmidt July 16th, 2023 @ 09:19 AM
- State changed from accepted to new
Hey, doing taxes currently and this ticket came up.
Although I agree with benny about the lossy concersion, PDF is the format to go with tax accountants and other book keeping software. At least if they are at the beginning of their evolution. Next step is CSV or API - which stilll don't accept eml
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Fabian Blechschmidt July 16th, 2023 @ 09:23 AM
Sorry for another comment, but might be helpful for all others: I just marked all the emails to print, print them all at once (which generates a 33 page pdf in my case), then I can drag and drop the miniatures (single pages or multiple) into the Finder which generates a new pdf with only the pages. Might be easier as to click through all the emails and print all of them on their own.
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benny August 26th, 2024 @ 12:46 PM
- State changed from accepted to fixcommitted
There's at least a step in the right direction in the latest test release. Both the “Export” menu item and the corresponding rule action now supports exporting emails as PDFs. I have not tested it much, but it seems to work. Here's a link to the first test release supporting this: https://updates.mailmate-app.com/archives/MailMate_r6063.tbz
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Joseph P. Hillenburg August 26th, 2024 @ 01:54 PM
Thanks - is 6063 considered to be relatively stable?
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Jon B. August 26th, 2024 @ 05:14 PM
The export to PDF works well. Any chance of getting a selector for it? Thank you.
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benny August 27th, 2024 @ 11:02 AM
For now, I suggest you create a tag, e.g., named “Printed” and then add a rule to the “Tagged > Printed” mailbox (or a smart mailbox you created yourself based on this tag) and then add a rule to this mailbox which just has an action (no conditions) to do the export.
I think this should work.
If you just mean a selector for the Export interface then it's simply named
export:
. I guess anexportAsPDF:
variant could be added which hides all the options and just provides a file requester (equivalent to the “Export as PDF...” option in Safari). -
benny August 27th, 2024 @ 11:33 AM
@Joseph: Yes, but I believe I provided the wrong link. It should be r6064.
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Jon B. August 27th, 2024 @ 11:48 AM
Ultimately if there is a selector the ability to specify to use the subject (or another fixed name) as the filename instead of calling the file selector would be ideal. Presumably this would involve passing the directory to save in.
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benny August 28th, 2024 @ 02:50 PM
Selectors need to be simple (I know some of them take a single argument). I would suggest the use of rules as described above for this, but I made a mistake which meant this was not possible in the linked release. This one should work better: r6065.
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Mac OS X email client.