Question

I am trying to set up a system where people can send an email to a certain address to have their phone number added to a database. I was hoping to use Automator to accomplish a lot of this. So far, this is what I have as a workflow:

1. Get New Mail For: DEMO
2. Find Mail Messages where All of the following are true: Entire Message contains BEACH
3. Get Selected Mail Messages
4. Extract Phone Numbers From Text
5. New Text Edit Document

This works, except Extract Phone Numbers From Text “was not supplied with the required data.” Never mind the DB stuff yet – that’s for another question –, how can I extract a phone number from the subject AND sender of an email in Automator? I’m clearly doing something wrong somewhere.

Answer 1

You fail to extract data from the text of the mail messages because you are not actually passing text to the extract action – you are passing mail message objects. If you want to process the sender and subject of a message, you will have to insert a “Run AppleScript” action with the following content before the “Extract Data from Text” action:

using terms from application "Mail"
    on run {input, parameters}
        set mailContents to {}
        repeat with aMessage in input
            set end of mailContents to subject of aMessage
            set end of mailContents to sender of aMessage
        end repeat
        return mailContents
    end run
end using terms from

– this will loop over all mail message objects and append their sender and subject properties to a list that is passed to the “Extract” action.

A few notes on your workflow

• Your “Get Selected Mail Messages” action isn’t needed after the “Find Mail Items” action – that returns a list of messages already (you would need it to return all messages from an account or mailbox, but you are filtering down to message level already).
• You might want to filter down where you look for messages, as the “Find” action takes a long time on large mail databases. If you start by finding a mail account, or better even, mailbox (“Inbox”, for instance), you can then insert a “Filter mail Items” action to return only the messages conforming to your search criteria (you can extend that into a cascade if you only want to look throughout the inbox of one of several mail accounts: find the account, filter on inbox, then filter on message criteria).