An old message on this subject came up with this, among other,
solutions for this problem.
activate application "Mail"
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Mail"
get value of attribute "AXSelectedText" of text area 1 of
scroll
area 2 of splitter group 1 of window 1
end tell
end tell
However, this works only on incoming messages in the three panel
view. It does not work if the message is displayed in its own
window, nor in an outgoing message.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a universal solution, or at
least one for an outgoing message?
It's a fairly simple matter to extract selected text from incoming
messages (however they're displayed), Michelle - but not quite so
trivial where outgoing messages are concerned. The only workaround
I'm aware of goes something like this:
-----------
on selected_Mail_text()
activate application "Mail"
tell application "System Events" to tell application process "Mail"
set current_target to window 1
tell current_target's splitter group 1 to if exists then set
current_target to it
tell attribute "AXSelectedText" of text area 1 of current_target's
scroll area -1 to if exists then return value
tell menu item "Copy" of menu "Edit" of menu bar item "Edit" of
menu bar 1
(* or, for greater portability: tell menu item 5 of menu 1 of menu
bar item 4 of menu bar 1 *)
if not enabled then return ""
set current_clipboard to the clipboard as record
set the clipboard to {}
click
repeat while (the clipboard) is {}
delay 0.1
end repeat
set selected_text to the clipboard
set the clipboard to current_clipboard
end tell
end tell
selected_text
end selected_Mail_text
