Extended mailto: URI scheme

MailMate supports the mailto: URI scheme which can be used to create new messages. For example, the following link creates a message with recipient, subject, and default body text:

mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text

This can be used within HTML pages as a link, but it can also be called directly, for example, using the open command in the Terminal:

open "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text"

Using the open command it is also possible to specify the application to be used when creating the message:

open -a MailMate "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text"

Otherwise, the default email application is used (this can be configured in the General preferences pane in Apple Mail or MailMate).

MailMate also extends the mailto: syntax to include some additional special parameters. These are from, attachment-url and send-now. For security reasons attachment-url and send-now are ignored except if the URI is provided via AppleScript. It can be done as follows using a single line in the Terminal:

osascript -e 'tell application "MailMate" to open location "mailto:me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text&attachment-url=file:///full/path/to/file.txt&send-now=yes" with trust'

The “with trust” part of the AppleScript command tells MailMate to not ignore the special parameters.

The from value should just be an email address and MailMate then takes care of finding the corresponding identity. It works with all identity settings including address patterns. If an unknown address is given then MailMate falls back to the default account. The open location command can also be used to open mid:, cid: or message: URLs. They are all based on the Message-ID header of emails.

Alternatively, there is a specific command to open a mailto: URL:

osascript -e 'tell application "MailMate" to open mailto "me@example.com?subject=Test&body=Body%20text&attachment-url=file:///full/path/to/file.txt&send-now=yes"'

This one has the advantage of working with AppleScript access groups for sandboxed applications. The scripting access group name is com.freron.MailMate.compose.

Note that it is also possible (and easier for shell scripts) to create messages using the emate command. The emate command is a simple interface to the mailto: URIs described above.

Hacking Integration with Third Party Applications

In practice, the extended mailto: URI scheme should allow MailMate to be integrated with applications which need to send messages with attachments. Unfortunately this often requires the developers of the applications to add scripts for MailMate. Some example scripts are included with MailMate and they can be enabled as described below using the Terminal (assuming all applications are in /Applications). Note that in some cases updating the applications involved or moving MailMate is going to break the symbolic links created.

Alfred 2

ln -s /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/Alfred\ 2/MailMate.scpt ~/Library/Application\ Support/Alfred\ 2/Plugins/Email/

iCal

mv /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/Mail.scpt /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailBackup.scpt
ln -s /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/iCal/Mail.scpt /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/

Note: The above does not work on Mountain Lion or later versions of macOS since Apple no longer uses the Mail.scpt file. It is unknown whether or not a workaround exists.

BusyCal

mv /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailAttachmentScript.scpt /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/MailAttachmentScriptBackup.scpt
ln -s /Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Other/BusyCal/MailAttachmentScript.scpt /Applications/BusyCal.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/

Note: The above only works for BusyCal 1.6.

LaunchBar

An example with instructions is available here.

The mlmt: URI scheme

In addition to the mailto: scheme MailMate has its own URI scheme named mlmt. This is likely to be extended over time, but for now it can be used to trigger toolbar-like searches. The following is an example of using it from the Terminal window:

mlmt:quicksearch?string=s%20mlmt

This searches subject lines for the value mlmt. and + are reserved characters.

In general, = and & are reserved characters in the query part of the URI since they are used to separate key/value parameters. For convenience, the + is also a reserved character since it’s replaced with the space character. If you need to use any of these reserved characters then they must be percent encoded.

AppleScript

AppleScript support is somewhat limited. You can use the mailto: scheme via AppleScript as described further above, but you can also do anything you can do with custom key bindings. It’s done like this:

tell application "MailMate" to perform { "toggleFlag:" }

Note that this can also be used to trigger any bundle command available in MailMate:

tell application "MailMate" to perform { "performBundleItemWithUUID:", "<UUID from bundle command>" }