Creating OS X Mail HTML Messages

Question

Hi all,
I have a mailing script which I use to send a message to a defined mailing list using AppleScript, AppleWorks and OS X Mail.
At the moment the outgoing message is created by the script as plain text, but what I'd like it to be is HTML. Any idea how I can set the mail message body to send HTML within the script?
Help appreciated.
Ross

Answer 1

This is to replace the previous post:
I have been searching for how to create custom HTML emails in Mail, in a way that would work with OS 10.3 and 10.4, so as not to rely on the user having Tiger. After reading through many posts, I came up with a script that creates a new HTML message that you can still edit in Mail itself before sending, and you don't need Safari 2. I'm new to scripting so please let me know if this is useful.
Jodain
Part I: defines the HTML code; you can make something in the script itself as long as the string this_html ends up in proper formatting. I actually came up with this primarily for pasting most the html code in the script itself, with a few changing variables. If you do paste or type html code in the script, make sure you use \\ for every \, and \" for every ". If you're using TextEdit to alter the html, use find and replace in that order (\:\\ then ":\").
Part II: builds a message in Mail with the html content... an undocumented property of a Mail message. However, it only works when visibility is false, so unless you send it right away, the user is not able to still type the recipients and edit the body in Mail as he/she might be used to. Which brings me to...
Part III: takes the saved draft and opens it up for editing. The open command only lets you view the message, even if it is outgoing, so I had to come up with a work-around so you can still edit as if you're composing it for the first time.
--Part I
tell application "Safari" to set this_html to source of document 1
tell application "Safari" to set this_page to name of document 1
--Part II
tell application "Mail"
activate
set theMsg to make new outgoing message with properties ¬
{subject:this_page, html content:this_html & ¬
return & return, content:""}
tell theMsg to make new to recipient
save theMsg
--Part III
if not (exists the front message viewer) then make new ¬
message viewer
tell front message viewer
set selected mailboxes to {the drafts mailbox}
set sort column to date received column
set sorted ascending to false
delay 3
set selected messages to {first message}
tell application "System Events" to tell process ¬
"Mail" to keystroke return
end tell
end tell