Send E-Mail with placeholders

[MacBookProUser]

Dear all,

I am quite new to Drafts but really felt in love with the clean interface and the great integrations. What I use heavily is Rosemary Orchards Action Set to create tasks in OmniFocus with TaskPaper. Since I write a lot of invoices I would love to have a solution quite similar to Rosmarys approach with OmniFocus. The largest part of my mails is always the same, the only changing thing is the recipient as well as the date. How can I add to the Mail or Airmail action a stop to ask for the placeholders and send them afterwards to the respective app? I compose my mails with Markdown, in case thats important for a solution.

Thank you so much for your help in advance!

Best regards,
Joerg

[cpac]

I’d have the Drafts action ask for those inputs before invoking the Mail step.

[MacBookProUser]

Thanks for your quick reply cpac. That’s exactly what I would like to do - but have absolutely no clue how to do it. Sorry, absolute beginner when it comes to draft. Do you have a hint how to get this done?

[cpac]

I’d create a new action and use some of the pre-defined steps like “Insert Text” “Define Template Tag” “Prompt” and “Mail” to try to build what you’re looking for.

Experiment with them. Add them one at a time. Tackle each piece of your overall action one bit at a time.

And If you run into issues, let us know…

[FlohGro]

maybe have a look to this thread:

Simple shortcut replacement

This action scans the current draft for shortcut abbreviations and expands them into larger phrases of text that you define. Action Directory link: https://actions.getdrafts.com/a/1IS Drafts Forum: Simple shortcut replacement Quick Start Create a draft with a tag shortcuts and add abbreviations you want replaced with longer phrases of text. Put each abbreviation and phrase on one line separated by a colon. .hw: Hello World .pi: 3.14159265358979323846 .ty: Thank you for your assistance in res…

I’d suggest to read the post and check the template parser on GitHub

I combinend the great work from @dchar with another action to use the template parser in the same action here.

[MacBookProUser]

Thanks a lot for the links! Already tried a few things, however, not really successful so far. The existing solutions seem to create a new draft with the replaced placeholder content. However, I am aiming for a way to replace them and send them to Apple Mail or Airmail directly. Means, the original file remains untouched.

[FlohGro]

if this is you’re only issue, you have two options:

1. just delete the newly created draft at the end (add a e.g. Mail step and afterwards delete the created draft)
2. don’t create a new draft and instead replace them in the template draft and restore the correct content there afterwards.