Before the age of real smartphones I created a Rube Goldberg-like workflow that listened for emails from my Nokia phone. The subject needed to contain a song and artist. Then the script pasted that subject line into iTunes. Then it would call my phone back via SkypeOut and as my phone was ringing it would press play in iTunes so I could hear my song through my phone. I called it Dittybot. My original blog post is gone, but here’s an Engadget article about it: <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2005-06-17-dittybot.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/2005-06-17-dittybot.html</a>
At my university we use Moodle and that lets me setup a page where students can schedule one-on-one appointments with me (during office hours). When a student books a time, Moodle sends me an email with the details.<p>I use a rule and an Applescript to scrape the details from the email and put the booking into my calendar.
Notes:<p>1. Apple Mail has had this feature for the last <i>20 years</i>. If macOS users to whom that feature is of interest are only now realizing it exists, this speaks volumes for Apple’s documentation and marketing.<p>2. The page says you can use AppleScripts as rule actions. It never tells you <i>how</i>. No sample scripts to use or learn from. No links to the documentation you’ll need to write your own.<p>Here’s a better third-party introduction from 2005(!) which includes a couple rule action examples:<p><a href="http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.21/21.09/ScriptingMail/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.21/21.09/Sc...</a><p>TBH, after 6 years rusting in maintenance mode, all its documentation long buried in archive, and the department responsible eliminated entirely, I am surprised Apple would still want to draw any attention to AppleScript at all. They only set up the unwary for disappointment later, once they discover for themselves the platform is already a walking corpse. That is no way to sell product. Alas, post-Jobs Apple cares little for joined-up thinking, or even motivation to do a half-decent job.<p>Let’s hope the Shortcuts team can eventually make a half-decent success of their product, because AppleScript automation has zero future. That said, if Ventura Mail still can’t use Shortcuts as rule actions then it doesn’t bode look great for them either.
Cloudflare's Email Workers is entering open beta soon, you can trigger any function you want using email. <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-route-to-workers/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-route-to-workers/</a>
One of the worst parts of Apple Mail is that they have entirely neglected the iOS version since the iPhone first came out. Its the same exact app afaik since iOS 1. No rules to make, not even colored flags, despite how powerful phones have gotten. My inbox stays polluted and unsifted until I open the lid on my macbook, it runs all these local rules and syncs to the email server, and my phone pulls the changes.
I thought it could be nice as a stand-in for an SSH Siri Shortcut action on iOS, because you don't need to reach out to a static IP address. It is more dynamic to be able to send an email from your phone to your Mac regardless of what network your Mac is currently on (so long as your Mac is awake).
Back in the day we used to download files from certain FTP servers via an email with the correct terms.
I never found it very interesting, but it was novel. It would have been much cooler had smartphones been around then.
Actual title: "Use scripts as rule actions in Mail on Mac"<p><i>You can attach an AppleScript script to a Mail rule. For example, you could have an incoming message trigger a script that copies information from the message and pastes it into a database that works with Script Editor.</i>