I send a moderate amount of off-list email, and I want the reader to KNOW it's off-list – so I use a subject prefix:
“[ OFFLIST ]”
I used to use:
“[OFFLIST]”
But people often tend to ignore bracketed text in the subject, and I found the addition of the spaces was more attention-grabbing.
I normally use Typinator to emplace this, and I occasionally forget to change the outgoing address.
It irritates the snot out of me when I goof and send an [ OFFLIST ] message TO the list it WASN'T supposed to go to.
Back in the better scripting days of Eudora I had a very sophisticated script to manage this sort of thing, but I gave up on trying to emulate such things with Mail for obvious reasons.
However – since System Events is faster and better these days I see no reason to avoid using it any more – and I'm slowly implementing functions I used to take for granted.
Here's a simple example of setting the subject of an outgoing message:
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tell application "System Events"
tell application process "Mail"
tell (first window whose subrole is "AXStandardWindow")
if value of static text 2 = "Subject:" then
tell text field 2
set msgSubject to its value
set msgSubject to "[ OFFLIST ] " & msgSubject
set its value to msgSubject
end tell
end if
end tell
end tell
end tell
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I'll add bits to make it throw an error if any recipient is one of my email lists or forums, and that will put PAID to this particular problem.