Question

I want to make an Mac application which read e-mails from Mail.app and display them, but I can’t find any info about how to read mail from Mail.app. My question is:

1. how to read e-mails from Mail.app? any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Applescript is probably the easiest way, for example:

tell application "Mail"
    set theMessage to message 1 of inbox
    set theBody to content of theMessage as rich text
end tell

Run the script through NSAppleScript, quick dirty example (no error handling and so on):

NSString *theSource = @"tell application \"Mail\"\n"
"set theMessage to message 4 of inbox\n"
"set theBody to content of theMessage as rich text\n"
"end tell\n"
"return theBody";
NSAppleScript* theScript = [[NSAppleScript alloc] initWithSource:theSource];
NSAppleEventDescriptor* theDescriptor = [theScript executeAndReturnError:NULL];
NSLog(@"%@", theDescriptor);

Alternative use osascript through NSTask to run the script.

EDIT (response to comment)

Loop through all messages and add their body to the theMessages list.

set theMessages to {}
tell application "Mail"
    set theCount to get the count of messages of inbox
    repeat with theIncrementValue from 1 to theCount by 1
        set TheMessage to message 1 of inbox
        set theBody to content of TheMessage as rich text
        set end of theMessages to theBody
    end repeat
end tell
return theMessages