Automators

In this episode, our intrepid Automators dive into email and cover the best ways to get your Mac, iOS devices, and the web wrangling your email for you.

• The Omni Group: Accomplish More Every Day

David keeps talking about all the subjects for Automators but settles on email for episode 2. Rose and David agree the emails you send do not need to all be special snowflakes.

David throws out TextExpander as the starting point because saving snippets in a Word document is madness. David likes automating the tab key when writing an email.

Both David and Rose use Automator on the Mac but agree it should be more powerful. Very quickly Rose presses on to Keyboard Maestro. Rose then explains how she uses a Keyboard Maestro script to look for the existence of a file to automatically assemble and send an email. David gets irrationally happy about the thought of email getting sent without any direct involvement.

Then our nerdy automators take on sorting email. Both of our hosts get too much pleasure from auto sorting unwanted email out of their life. David bangs on about a years-old request to make Apple’s cloud-based email rules stronger. David mentions his beloved AppleScript that auto inserts an email recipient’s name.

The Omni Group sponsored this show, and Rose and David agree that they’re swell.

Then Rose and David move on to iOS email automation. The way email apps make you create email links to only their apps makes David sad but Rose digs it. Then David subtly pitches a reality show about two Italians in the middle of a vineyard. Rose then admits she has a thing about email clients and once installed 28 of them.

And then they get to Workflow. So much talking about Workflow. Ultimately, David admits to being “that guy”.

Then our hosts address cloud-based automation, and David closes up banging the drum about dictation and email. Rose and David both love the secret Drafts unending dictation tool. If you’re reading this and you’re from Apple, move along. This is not the app you’re looking for.