Automator and iCal: Schedule email and send group mail with individual salutation on Mac

(I found an easier way… see this post)

I wanted to send groups mails with individual salutation at a scheduled date and time. There’re several free scripts / apps out there to do this. I’ve tried probably all of them but none really worked (I’m running on Snow Leopard).

There’re paid apps to do this but then I don’t wanna pay. (Yes, I proudly admit I’m cheap in this sense.)

Ok, if I only wanted the individual salutation part, Serial Mail is a good one and it’s free. It doesn’t only support names as placeholders but also other fields in the Address Book. It’s also got an iPhone app! One very good news for iPhone user as the built in mail app in iPhone doesn’t support group mail.

So… what to do?

After many trials and errors, my final solution is “Automator + iCal”.

There’s this built-in app in Mac called “Automator”. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what it is for the first two or three years I switched to Mac. I don’t use it that frequently until very recently. Anyway, to the steps:

To send GROUP EMAILS WITH INDIVIDUAL SALUTATION with Automator immediately:

1. Launch Automator: New workflow
2. Mail: New Mail Message (add by drag and drop) – For group mail, leave “To:”, “Cc:” and “Bcc:” blank. Do fill in the Subject line, write your mail in “Message”, choose account if you have multiple accounts set up. NO ATTACHMENT. If you want individual salutation, don’t write “Dear xxx” at the beginning of your mail.)
3. Contacts: Find Address Book Groups – Find people / groups and define it
4. Mail: Group Mailer – check “Add Greeting” if you want to have individual salutation. Otherwise, uncheck it.)
5. Mail: Send Outgoing Messages

If you want to send your mails immediately, click “Run” on the top right corner. But if you want to send your group mail later at a specific date and time… go on with the following steps:

1. Save as application (remember where you’ve saved it. You’ll need its path soon.)
2. Open iCal and set up a new event at the time you want you mail to be sent
3. Set alarm -> open file -> choose the application you’ve just saved two steps ago
4. Done

If you don’t want the new event to stick in your calendar, add the following steps after step 5:

1. Find iCal Events (Find events, All of the following are true, Title is “title of your new event”…)
2. Delete iCal Events

But it’s probably easier to just delete it from calendar afterwards

What about if you just want to SCHEDULE ONE SINGLE EMAIL?

1. Launch Automator: New workflow
2. Mail: New Mail Message (add by drag and drop) – Type your recipients’ email address in “To:”, “Cc:” and “Bcc:” as needed. No auto-fill here. You may click the vCard icon on the right to choose recipients from Address Book. Before hitting “Done”, remember to hit “To” after choosing. Do fill in the Subject line or it’ll ., Write your mail in “Message”, choose account if you have multiple accounts set up. NO ATTACHMENT.)
3. Send Outgoing Messages
4. Save as application (remember where you’ve saved it. You’ll need its path soon.)
5. Open iCal and set up a new event at the time you want you mail to be sent
6. Set alarm -> open file -> choose the application you’ve just saved two steps ago
7. Done

Important notes:

* It’s VERY IMPORTANT to save your workflow as APPLICATION in scheduled email. If you save it as workflow, it’ll only call out the workflow without running it, which means… it won’t do anything.

* NO ATTACHMENT: Someone said here that we may add attachment to group mailer in Automator but it never worked for me. And even if it works, it won’t work with scheduled mail anyways – it requires manual input when mails are being generated. My workaround is to upload the file to a server / website, then paste the link in the mail body. The “New Mail Message” in Automator does recognize URL so if your recipients can see HTML mail, they should be able to just click and see your file.