Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition

The Mail application supplied by Mac OS X provides two services to other applications: Send Selection and Send To.

• Send Selection. Your selection will appear in the body of a new email message.

• Send To. Your selection will appear in the address of a new email message.

A typical use of the Mail service is as follows:

1. Select a name or email address in the body of your TextEdit document (or other word processor — it has to support Services).

2. Select Services Mail Send To from the Application menu. The Mac OS X Mail application opens with a new email message addressed as you specified, shown in Figure 11-4.

   Figure 11-4: Use Mail’s Send To service to create a mail message addressed to the selected name.

Be aware that the Mail Send To service does not check for a valid email address or name. It merely takes the text you provide and places that text into the To: field of a new mail message.

Similarly, select a block of text, an image, or other material and choose Services Mail Send Selection from the application menu to create a new email message in Mail with the selected text or image in the body of the email message, as shown in Figure 11-5.

Figure 11-5: Use Mail’s Send Selection service to make an email message from selected text, as seen here, or from other media.

In addition to the Send Selection and Send to commands available to all compatible applications, Mail also provides a Send File service to mail an entire file from the Finder. To use this service, select a file or an entire folder in the Finder and then choose the Finder Services Mail Send File command, as shown in Figure 11-6. This command will not be visible in the Finder unless a file is selected.

Figure 11-6: From the Finder, select a file (top); select the Mail service’s Send File command (middle) and a new message will open with the file included as an attachment (bottom).