I searched the forums but could not find the answer.
Is it possible for Trickster to register files opened directly from Apple Mail, from an email attachment? I believe the Trickster promo video shows this.
This use case is actually more for my wife than me. She often opens an attachment (eg, a PDF) and then wonders where it went. Even more critically, she sometimes open a Word doc from Mail, edits it, and then really needs to find it…
So I tried opening a PDF attachment from Mail with Preview. Trickster did not register it. I then tested the file with Trickster’s “drop a file to test” tool, which it said would not show, but I got the path. I then added the “Mail Downloads” folder (buried in the Library) to the watched folders. Now Trickster says it should show it, but it still does not.
What am I missing?
ps - Side note, I first went to the home page for Apparent Software, and clicked Support. That directs to the Freshdesk forums, which look to be older. Are the Discourse forums the correct ones?
Freshdesk is still what we use for general support. This is where support@apparentsoft.com goes and it’s better for private customer support. These forums are relatively new and we’re ok with people using it for support as well but most people still go through Freshdesk because that’s what the Support forms in the applications do. Discourse is not good for personal or email-based support but it is a much better forum than the one that Freshdesk provides, so those weren’t used much.
There’s no built-in support for this. Mail Attachments indeed live in some “private” Library folder of Mail.
This folder (or one of its parents) is a bundle or a package type of folder. Thus Trickster ignores files in this folder, even if it’s watched. Maybe we should have an option to force some folders to skip this behaviour, just like Trickster does for DEVONthink filers, which are also in a package folder (the database).
Mail probably also doesn’t report these files as being opened and that’s why they don’t register. It’s also really not good to edit these files since they are edited in that private place and the attachments can be rewritten or deleted by Mail since this folder is only a kind of a cache. That’s why Mail itself suggests saving attachments. Then Trickster can track them (provided that the folder is watched).
That being said, I could possibly develop special handling for Mail’s attachments folder and have an option to track it and some good way (perhaps with some special AppleScript or something).
Fun unknown trivia, when Trickster was at version 1.0 (it was then called Blasted), the development version for 1.1 had support for getting attachments from a Gmail account. But we didn’t ship it.
I’ll add this request to our feature list.
If more people want this feature please either like @devynosborne’s post or, add a comment. Your vote counts.
Agreed! Nonetheless, sometimes my wife does (as I imagine others do).
Though I don’t edit these temporary files myself, and am usually religious about saving them, I’ve certainly been guilty of quickly opening, forgetting to save, and then trying to find them again…
I think it would be great. I could imagine it might be a weird thing to track, since it’s a cache of (possibly temporary) files. I don’t know. Not being a developer myself, I know enough to know that the seemingly easy thing can actually be quite tricky…
In any case, I know my wife would find this kind of tracking invaluable, meaning I would too, since I’m the one that has to help her when attachments go missing…
