Rules and sorting

Question

1. On the PC, I had the bodies of my emails scanned by the mail package, it looked for key words (about 20 criteria). I didn't find a rule option for "BODY" or "CONTENTS" in Imail. Possible? Is there a replacement (not entourage) that does this?
2. I would ultimately like to sort mail by the first 3 characters in the attachment name. Possible? if attachment name is 12345james.jpg, I want to put it in a folder named "123"

Answer 1

Try this for starters - it is hacked from a similar one, but not thoroughly tested. Paste it into Script Editor and save it - use the path in the introductory comment. It will do nothing if a message passed to it has no attachment. If the message has an attachment it will pull off the first 3 characters of the attachment name. If there is no mailbox with that name it will make one (you could land up with hundreds of mailboxes!). It will move the message to the mailbox.
Note that it will work either with a message (or several messages) selected in Mail if you run it from the script menu in the menu bar, or if fired by a rule. It would be a good idea to try it from the menu bar before setting your rule to fire it.
There is at least one problem with it - when fired by a rule you land up with two copies of the triggering message, one in the target mailbox and one in the in box. I don't know how to fix that.
Feel free to change it to what you want.
AK
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">(*Save the script in the Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail folder of your home directory. 
AK Apr 2009 kinsella at itcarlow dot ie *)
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages TheMail
tell application "Mail"
repeat with ThisMail in TheMail
if (count of mail attachments of ThisMail) > 0 then
set AttName to name of first mail attachment of ThisMail
set AttName to (items 1 thru 3 of characters of AttName) as string
if not (exists mailbox AttName) then
make new mailbox with properties {name:AttName}
end if
move ThisMail to mailbox AttName
end if
end repeat
end tell
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
using terms from application "Mail"
on run
tell application "Mail" to set sel to selection
tell me to perform mail action with messages (sel)
end run
end using terms from
</pre>