MacOSX: new mail with attachment

Question

I want to create a new mail with the default mail client and attach a file automatically to it.

To create a new mail to dummy@somewhere.com with subject foo and body bar , I can do the following:

open "mailto:dummy@somewhere.com?subject=foo&body=bar"

How can I attach a file now?

If this is not possible this way (with open ), what are my alternatives?

I would prefer a solution which works in Java as well as in native languages (C++, ObjC). So if there is a way via shell to do this, this would make it easy as I can just spawn such a progress.

Otherwise I would have to fall back to some SMTP engine and just write an own small mail sender.

Answer 1

You can do this via AppleScript, eg

tell application "Mail"
    set msg to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"Test", visible:true}
    tell msg to make new to recipient with properties {address:"someone@somewhere.com"}
    tell msg to make new attachment with properties {file name:"Macintosh HD:Users:me:my_file.txt" as alias}
end tell

If you don't have any way to run AppleScript directly then you can use osascript via the command line, eg

osascript <<EOF
tell application "Mail"
    set msg to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"Test", visible:true}
    tell msg to make new to recipient with properties {address:"someone@somewhere.com"}
    tell msg to make new attachment with properties {file name:"Macintosh HD:Users:me:my_file.txt" as alias}
end tell
EOF