Save message as PDF

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.

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.)

One keystroke (via a selector) to do something that takes several steps as you outline is generally useful for tasks that are performed frequently.

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.

@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.

@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.

@Benny, lots of people who are not very tech savvy prefer working with the PDF

@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).

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.

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.

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.

Thanks - is 6063 considered to be relatively stable?

The export to PDF works well. Any chance of getting a selector for it? Thank you.

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 an exportAsPDF: variant could be added which hides all the options and just provides a file requester (equivalent to the “Export as PDF...” option in Safari).

@Joseph: Yes, but I believe I provided the wrong link. It should be r6064.

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.

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.