“I have a rule in Mail, which moves specific emails to a specific email folder… Now I need an AppleScript to run in conjunction with the rule, which will save each email as a txt file in a folder on my desktop…. Can anyone suggest how I go about this?”

You remember that I whipped up an Export Apple Mail Messages to Text Files script just a few weeks ago that pretty much fits that description, right? So I thought that, in the process of turning it into something that Apple Mail can use, I could do a little walk-through for you guys of how to write a script like this in the first place!

Easy, right? A walk in the park.

HA! (And how does that Robert Burns poem go again?)

“Hmmph. That’s weird.”

After a short burst of hack-fu, I had a script that would work within Apple Mail…with one small caveat: When selecting the message and applying the rule manually, everything worked… But when a message arrived on my Exchange email account and triggered the script by a rule, it exported the content of the previous message to the resulting text file.

Hmmph. That’s weird. “I must have made a mistake somewhere…”, I said to myself.

But no matter what I tried, it always exported the wrong file! I called in the big guns for help with this post on the MacScripter website. Ben Waldie — a guru in AppleScript community and author of many excellent books about Automator– personally pitched in to try and sort this out…. sadly to no avail. (Thanks again, Ben!)

A quick search around reveals that this may not just be me: I saw this Comment Thread and also this post on stackoverflow.

Is this a wide-spread bug with Apple Mail, Exchange, and AppleScript? I’ve noticed a few other shall-we-say… anomalies with the way OS X works with Exchange — and I’m starting to wonder if this is another to add to the list.

Anyone else have the same issue? Please post in the comments below!

A description of what you’ve found out would be great (especially if it solves the problem) — but even a “Me too!” is helpful.