[freudling]

Long shot, but in the age of pure internetness, most all of my invoices are now sent via email. That means no printing, just good ol' Apple Mail. I have a nice rich text email template I use, but I would like the ability of Mail to automatically insert an invoice number into each invoice I send. This can be done with Pages, Word, etc. in various ways, but I don't use those for my email templates. I simply email a rich text document and edit the text within mail (i.e. Dear...., body of email changed to reflect who I am sending, cost...).

Any takers? Maybe Automator can help me, because I use Automator to initiate the email anyway.

The beautiful thing about all this is that, I use a separate contact management software package that shows all the emails sent and received to each of my contacts. So any organization in my contact list that I have invoiced will have the sent invoice email attached to them. Email is the way to go, just need this figured out.

[itai195]

You'd probably have to do it via an AppleScript (or a Run AppleScript action in Automator) but without knowing any specifics about your setup I can't provide you with more specific advice than that. You'd need to generate the invoice somehow and write a script to place it within the body of the e-mail wherever you want it.

[freudling]

To send an invoice:

I run my automator script to generate a new rich text email, which is an html file located on my hard drive. The automator script opens the html file in Safari, then actions the "mail contents of the page" feature from safari. The email pops up with my rich text embedded within. I then edit the body text of the email. This way, my emails get sent looking great with no attachments. My company logo, formatting, all preserved this way. No need to use other programs to make invoices, neither export PDFs and such. I have a smart folder that automatically catches each invoice sent out. With my contact organizer software, all organizations in my address book who I have invoiced have those emails attached to them, respectively.

So, the big deal here is that I save on spraying both my hard drive and the recipients with more files. And I stay super organized this way and save time.

I just want it so when I generate a new email from the automator script, that it inserts a variable into the email, like #103. Next email would be #104, and so on. Even if this were only in the subject line it would be great. It doesn't have to be in the body of the email. The purpose is of course to save me time from looking in the smart folder to see what the last invoice number was, and to keep me in check. Any input would be great.