Apple

I thought applications were not supposed to make themselves visible when launched via applescript in Leopard unless they are specifically "activated." I have seen this work with iCal, but it seems to fail with Mail here:

tell application "Mail"
set newMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {subject:"test", content:"mytext"}
tell newMessage
make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {name:"yourNameHere", address:"email@hidden"}
end tell
end tell

Applications do launch hidden in Leopard, and Mail did in fact launch hidden, but there's nothing to say that an application can't make itself visible in response to a command. In this case, you implicitly told it to show by not specifying "visible:false" in the outgoing message properties. That said, it wouldn't have worked right even if you did, because Leopard Mail seems to always show the new message at least briefly, so that's a bug in Mail.

--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering