Anything at all that's the name of a menu item or submenu item of any application - and all the Rules are menu items of the "Apply Rule" submenu in the Message menu in Entourage, as long as the main window is in the front and the Mail area is displayed - can be given an Application Keyboard Shortcut in Panther, yes. Pretty cool, yes?
Mind-blowingly cool – yes.
I can now do with rules some of the things I needed a script to do, especially where I previously needed the script just to get the keyboard input. Although the rules are obviously more limited, they have the advantage of being very quick to set up and they execute quickly without seeming to stall the operation of the program. The difference between looking in a submenu for the 14th choice and hitting a single keyboard command is more than I could have asked for. For example, deleting all non-flagged, normal or lower priority messages that have been read is easy to set up and fast to execute. So cool.
Isn’t it funny how incorporating a few of the changes one has wanted (in my case, using the keyboard for rules and the Tasks printout that was derived from your script, which is now retired to Script Heaven) dramatically impacts the experience of using Entourage. The faster searching still brings a smile to my face, because it has made a really big difference on my elderly 1999 iMac 350.
Sadly, I now have to share my computer with my 5 year-old, as he has begun typing his life story in Word (at least the 2 1/2 years that he is able to remember). I’m keeping him out of Entourage because, well, I want to keep him safe from the baddies and most of his peers don’t read too much yet. Perhaps he’ll tire of reading and writing and I’ll be able to get back to being online a bit more. Or perhaps I can convince his mother that he needs a far better computer than mine, and I’ll be able to sneak onto his Mac once in a while.
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Bruce
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B R U C E K. klutch-at-erols.com
