Hi folks, 

Lingo-L is one of many digests that I subscribe to, but one thing I find frustrating 
about it is that the subject lines and authors are not listed at the top of the 
digest, making it very tedious to skim for tidbits on a busy day.

I am sure Tab has his reasons for constructing the digest this way, and I seem to 
remember some discussion about it at some point, but I have taken the matter into my 
own hands and created a small Applescript which pulls out the headers and displays 
them in a text window for rapid perusal.

The script is for Barebones' excellent (and astonishingly scriptable) Mailsmith, but 
should also work fine (after a little tweaking) with Eudora and Outlook, possibly 
others, except I'm not sure those clients have a plain text window option. (So, just 
dump the text in an unsent email). 

It also requires the Akua sweets scripting addition (for a basic grep operation) which 
you can download from <ftp://ftp.akua.com/pub/mac/AkuaSweets/>. You could write the 
script without this, but it would be twice as long, and much slower. Anyone even 
vaguely interested in scripting on the Mac should have Akua sweets installed anyway. 
Arguably the best and most versatile piece of Mac freeware extant. Anyway, just paste 
the script into script editor, tweak if necessary, and then save in the 'scripts' 
folder of your email app and you are away. (It would be great to see this, a Eudora 
and Outlook version of this script, perhaps appearing on the Lingo-L web page for 
download).

I hope no-one minds if I post the script here:

tell application "Mailsmith 1.1"
    set messageExists to ((message of window 1) exists)
    if not messageExists then -- no message
        beep
        return
    end if
    set m to (message of window 1)
    set subj to (subject of m)
    set c to (content of m as text)
end tell

if not (subj begins with "Lingo-L Digest V") then
    beep
    return -- almost certainly not a lingo-l digest
end if

set FromLines to (paragraphs of (collect lines of c that match "From*")) -- Akua
set subjectLines to (paragraphs of (collect lines of c that match "Subject*")) -- Akua
set cnt to (count FromLines)
set str to ""
repeat with m from 1 to cnt
    set header to ""
    set header to header & (item m of FromLines) & return
    set header to header & (item m of subjectLines) & return
    set str to str & header & return
end repeat

tell application "Mailsmith 1.1"
    set wname to "Lingo-L Subject Lines and Senders"
    if (window wname exists) then
    else
        tell (make new text window)
            set name to wname
        end tell
    end if
    tell window wname
        set contents to str
    end tell
end tell


Apologies to Windows users for occupying your bandwidth; And to those Mac users who 
have not yet discovered the joys of a scriptable mail client: Get with the program!

-Brennan

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