I suppose for starters I should reiterate my love of the two topics of conversation here: MailMate and SaneBox.
MailMate is my email app of choice on macOS, and not only because it supports Markdown. It’s customizable to an extreme, and for a nerd like me it allows me to use exactly the email management and organization system I choose (i.e. “spend too much time refining and modifying”). I use it with Readdle’s Spark on iOS and have it correspond tags to Gmail labels, use Gmail style single-key shortcuts, and all kinds of other fun stuff. MailMate was one of my 2016 picks for best productivity apps.
SaneBox is a service that intelligently sorts my email into categories. My inbox only contains emails that are actually of importance, other messages get sorted into “Later”, “Bulk”, “News”, “Reading”, etc.. Also, “BlackHole” for senders I never want to see again but don’t want to click a sketchy “unsubscribe” link. It’s easily trainable and completely indispensable. One of its features is “SaneAttachments,” which automatically finds emails with large attachments, moves them to Dropbox, and replaces the email with one containing only the Dropbox links. The originals are saved for a period of time, then cleared out of your mailbox. I love this feature.
My only issue with it is that the links go to the Dropbox website. Obviously, that’s the best solution for cross-platform compatibility. But when I’m on my Mac, getting to the files requires opening the link in a browser and then using Dropbox’s slightly inconsistent interface to reveal the files locally. So I wrote a MailMate bundle command to reveal the files directly in Finder with a keystroke.
I started a MailMateMate bundle on GitHub. Right now it only has two commands, and one of them is completely useless since MailMate comes with a “Copy Message URL” command built in. But the new command, “Reveal SaneAttachments,” is delightful, if I may say so. Hit ⌘Y, choose the command, and it will scan the email body for all of the file links, then open a Finder window with all of the files from that message selected.
To install this custom bundle, download the latest release from GitHub, unzip it, and place the entire “.mmbundle” folder into ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Bundles/. Once it’s there, you can select a message with SaneAttachments and hit ⌘Y (Command-Y) to run it.
If you’re into git and want to easily keep the bundle updated, you can clone the repo in Terminal:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Bundles/
git clone https://github.com/ttscoff/MailMateMate.mmBundle.gitThen when you want to update, use:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Bundles/MailMateMate.mmBundle
git pullI don’t know how many more I’ll add, but there might be more fun stuff coming. If you’re a bit of a nerd (er, Power User) and haven’t taken a look at MailMate, you should. And everyone should take a look at SaneBox. No nerdery needed there, it’s effortless and automatic. Worth it.
