[Macworld]

Post your comments for Automator workflow of the month: Sending holiday greetings here

[brilor]

"Under Mountain Lion this action doesn't work within this workflow as it should"
Has a bug been filed with Apple? <https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn>

[wardoggie]

This is pretty cool. I'm on Snow Leopard and use Outlook 2011, so here's what I did:

1. Select and drag "Create New Outlook Mail Message" to the actions/workflow side
2. enter the "To," subject line and message body copy
3. Select and drag "Get Specified Finder Items" to the actions/workflow side
4. Add the file you'd like to attach
5. Select and drag "Add Attachments to Outlook Messages" to the actions/workflow side
6. Select and drag "Send Outgoing Outlook Messages" to the actions/workflow side
7. Save the iCal alarm

When I saved the iCal alarm as "test_automator_email," iCal opened a new event entitled "test_automator_email." I just edited that event (set it to go off 5 minutes in the future) and--bang!--it worked!

[nebelch]

There are two ways to simplify the workflow:

1. Replace Pause/Run AppleScript with Send Outgoing Messages, and then select the Send action and choose Action > Ignore Input. (You should see the connectors disappear.) This makes Send work in this context on Lion and Mountain Lion.

2. Notice that New Mail Messages can accept files as input, and adds them as attachments -- that means the workflow can be just

Get Specified Finder Items > New Mail Message > Send Outgoing Messages

No “ignore input” trick is needed in this case.