I have stumbled upon a fantastic new email client for windows called mailbird. The great thing in my view about this program is its ease of access to its email compose window while in any window's program. Put in other words, one does not have to have to be in the mailbird client application use its Quick-Compose email feature. The additional significant feature is its attachment handling by way of drag and drops and quick preview feature. Frequently I am always using Directory Opus to search for a particular file to attach to an email. So it would seem to me that if one could have a script attached to a button in Directory Opus that sent out the Ctrl + Alt + Space key sequence to the windows shell see:
Then this would bring up the Mailbird Quick-Compose Window so that one could send an email and drag and drop an attachment to same. This I believe would be much faster than copying the path to the attachment and then launching say Outlook or similar email client. The icing on the cake would be to somehow auto-populate the subject field with the root folder name, which for my workflow is always named as the combination of the project number and project address. For example 1705 - 15 Smith Street, Jonestown.
So in short, the button would first look for the name on of the root folder where the attachment resides. The directory structure may look something like this
1705 - 15 Smith Street, Jonestown
ISSUED
2017.10.22 PDF Email Attachment
1705 -Attachment #1.pdf
1705 -Attachment #2.pdf
1705 -Attachment #3.pdf
The workflow would be to:
Press the new custom email button in Directory Opus.
The button would execute a script designed by some coding genious in this forum.
The button first copies the root folder name to the clipboard in this case: 1705 - 15 Smith Street, Jonestown
A windows shell command with the Ctrl + Alt + Space key code sequence is sent to the Windows OS.
The Mailbird Quick-Compose window become active.
The clipboard contents is sent to the subject feild of the Mailbird Quick-Compose window.
1705 -Attachment #1.pdf, 1705 -Attachment #2.pdf, 1705 -Attachment #3.pdf are dragged to the Mailbird Quick-Compose window.
Fill in the recipient field of Mailbird Quick-Compose window.
If the mail program has a command line that lets you tell it to compose a new message with a list of filepaths as attachments, that would be the best way to do this.
Thank you for your reply. The significant advantage with Mailbird is that the Mailbird Quick-Compose window can be opened very quickly. The reason is that email client is always running as a background process. So for example, while in any Windows program a small email window just appears and floats on top ones opened application. In the scenario that I described one assumed to be hunting for the correct file attachments to send to a client or to external team members working on the same project. Once the proper attachments are found amongst the nested folder hierarchy in DO, then one just drags them to floating email send window and you are done.
Ordinarily one would have to kick of Outlook wait for it to load etc. copy path to each attachment or use the paper clip to and navigate to the correct location etc. But Mailbird this is eliminated Mailbird as all one does is press the Ctrl + Alt + Space keys to invoke the email send window, right within Directory Opus or any other Windows program for that matter.
Thus, what I am alluding to is that we could create a DO button that sends the Ctrl + Alt + Space character sequence to the Windows Shell to envoke the Mailbird Quick-Compose window automatically. By doing that one doesn't have to remember the crucial series of keystrokes and at the same time, as kicking off the Mailbird Quick-Compose window the DO script/button could do other things. For example, it could fill out the email subject line automatically and maybe even fill in a standard list of email recipients for a project. This all presupposes that the one can send external key sequences out of DO to the operating system and that the send mail window can accept set field commands from DO. A text file containing all the textual information one needs on a regular basis could be stored at say the root level of the project directory.
In other words, one sets up a project correctly by using a text file i.e. project number and its name, regular email recipients list and then through the course of the design period emails are handled with just one DO script/button click. The attachments in the project directory I suppose would have to be found first and then with one click; the email fields would somehow be autopopulated. The script would have to wait for attachments for the attachments to be dragged to the email before the send command is executed. I suppose all this makes this harder a little harder that I first envisaged. This interoperability stuff may be just too hard a problem to automate but if we did have the ability to send emails from DO with just one click that I believe would be a killer feature.
It won't matter how you trigger the program. Via a hotkey or via running the program again, in either case it will (usually) just signal to the already-running instance of the program to open its window and do things. You may need to find the right command line arguments to make it open the Quick Compose window, but if it has a way to do so from the command line then that's the best thing to use. (If it doesn't, then other approaches may need to be considered, of course.)
Using a command line interface makes much more sense than trying to automate sending hotkeys to other programs, and is more likely to provide a way to send the files to the program, which can't be done via hotkeys alone.