Why are you making a post about MacOS?
Honestly, no clue. At my current job, I have recently been appointed first contact for our Cloud system. This is a honour in itself, but oh what did I get myself into.
See technically, we only support Windows 10/11, but obviously some people would LOVE to use a Macbook because “It just works”. Sure no problem I said, it’s just a remote desktop after all. WRONG! It’s a “shared remote desktop”, so people can’t install mailing software to send their invoices, this is a HUGE problem for our customers. So what did my kind and smart colleague’s invent? A Visual Basic script for Microsoft Outlook! YIPPEE. Now all jokes aside, this script is quite robust and when it works, it works flawlessly. Unlesssss you’re on anything that isn’t a Windows computer or are using the new version of Outlook. Yay complications….
And here I went, down the rabbit hole of figuring out how to get this ENTIRE system ported to MacOS.
Context
Okay so I owe you people a TINY bit of context. I currently work full-time as a Technical Consultant Service Desk for my company Gilde Software (beware when looking this up, it’s 100% in Dutch). Our company provides customers with a full ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. From creating quotes to starting a project, invoicing and everything in between. So you can probably see why having a working e-mail solution is important.
Normally, our software uses the Windows API to manually spin up an instance of Outlook, create a new e-mail, define the correct settings and attach any files the user has chosen. All good so far, but our Cloud environment does not come with Outlook. So what to do, well we create a small script within the program to convert all of the Windows API calls to plain old text which then gets put in an .xml file for easier parsing. This file has information like which e-mail address to send to, what is the subject, which files to attach and what is the e-mail supposed to say. Quite clever so far. Now how do we get this .xml file into Outlook? More scripting of course!
A senior colleague of mine created a Visual Basic script which gets imported as a macro into Outlook, which parses any .xml files in a specific folder to then automatically make any e-mails the user had requested beforehand. Nifty huh? WRONG. This does not work in anything but Windows!!! WINDOWS BAD!!!!!
Why I took this project upon myself
I only started working for this company on the 1st of October 2024, it has as of the writing of this post been 5 months and 20 days since I started working here. So why did I immediatly jump onto this project? You might ask. Masochism? Well to be quite frankly, I just figured it can’t be THAT difficult to do the same for MacOS, I mean it is just Unix after all and we still recommend using Outlook.
Well, I was wrong, but also very right. I wrote a mockup script in Applescript within a single working day, which could already parse an entire .xml file from a very specific folder in the users directory. Success! You might say. But oh did this get out of scope.
The basic premise of the system
Let’s say we have a file defined as email.xml, and this e-mail contains this:
<email>
<subject>Payment please</subject>
</email>
Seems simple enough to parse right? Well? Well yeah it really is lmao. Applescript has a built-in XML parser, you just need to give it the correct context like so:
tell application "System Events"
set xmlData to contents of XML file "email.xml"
set varSubject to value of XML element "subject" of XML element "email" of xmlData
display dialog varSubject
end tell
Yes, that’s literally all you have to do to parse a VERY specific file with very specific conditions. But it’s never this specific obviously, what if the user wanted to prepare 20 e-mails to bulk send at the end of the day? Problem! We can only parse 1 at this time and compounded by that, the filename is hard-coded. This is honestly where I spend most of my time, getting every little edge case covered so nothing can break, and it probably still breaks somehow, because we love coding!
I’d genuinely love to share the entire code with all of you, honestly if you’re smart enough you could find it online right now, but openly sharing information about the workings of our very proprietary system, does not seem like a good idea regarding my job…
So what now
Honestly, I don’t know. I’m kinda bored after doing this for a week, I wrote an entire script to parse e-mails from a proprietary program, made a setup script to install all requirements regarding the system. And god forbid, I even wrote an entire manual on how to set this up. Automated and manually!
I will probably post a bit more detail about this script on a later date if anyone is even interested, and right now I’m just too lazy to add screenshots. So keep an eye out for that.
Right now I think I’ll go enjoy my weekend and probably begin posting stuff about my homelab, because I’m a nerd like that.