[MlMt] Dragging messages (to the Finder and elsewhere)

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 31 May 2012, at 11:26, Torsten Grust wrote:

> in the release notes of Revision 2898 I found the following item:

Just a reminder (to everyone): Always be careful with test versions if 
you have not been in contact with me. They can and do often contain 
serious bugs. Currently, the only known serious issue with r2898 is a 
crash bug triggered when forwarding messages (only some messages I 
believe -- I haven't looked into it yet).

> Dragged messages (to the Finder) are now named using their
> subject. Configurable using hidden setting: MmFilenameFormatString.
>
> And indeed: dragging a message to the Finder now creates a very
> sensibly named .eml file.  Great!

You can thank Vincent Noel: 
http://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/256-better-name-for-emails-drag-n-dropped-as-files#ticket-256-3

> I do find myself dragging messages to other places as well.  
> Alarms.app
> comes to mind, for example.  Dragging and dropping message from 
> MailMate
> into Alarms creates an entry named according to the `message' URL 
> scheme
> (`message://<message-id-here>').  Dragging that same message from 
> Mail.app
> instead creates an entry that reflects the message's subject -- very 
> useful.
> (Both Alarms entries properly link back to the correct messsage in
> Mailmate, by the way.)
>
> Would MailMate be able to behave the same here?

I think it (at least) should be possible to make it behave like Apple 
Mail.

I tried fetching Alarms.app and it seems that if I put RTF on the 
pasteboard (as I do now) and I do NOT put a plain text string on the 
pasteboard then it works as in Apple Mail. But I took a look at what 
Apple Mail puts on the pasteboard and it turns out that my RTF solution 
was a bad choice. Apple Mail puts a pasteboard type named 
`public.url-name` on the pasteboard. If I do the same then it works as 
expected with Alarms, iCal, and TextEdit.

Time will tell if any other apps do not like it, but it is probably 
pretty safe to mimic Apple Mail.

(Some times it can be very tricky to deal with pasteboards, for example, 
when dragging text out of MS Word then both plain text and an image of 
the text is put on the pasteboard...)

-- 
Benny