Maybe I am just a new age Mac guy – or because I am a convert, but I love my right mouse button.  I was using a PowerPC iMac for a while and kept wanting to throw it across the room, because it was using one of the old apple mice that only had a single click… ARG!

Anyway,  here is a trick to add a short cut to the OSX Right click menu. Ever spend several minutes searching for a file and then have to go through the hassle of starting a new email message to attach the file to …

check this out.

In Finder, right click on a file … any file you wish, go to “More => Automator => Create Work Flow”.  This will launch Automator with the file you right clicked on set as selected in the first step of the new work flow “Get Specified Finder Options”:

Now click the “Mail” icon under the Library, then click and drag the “New Mail Message”action into the workflow, followed by the “Add Attachment to Front Message” action:

Click “Run” to test – you should see Mail.app jump to the foreground, then a new message window open with the file attached.

If this all works correctly, in the “Get Specified Finder Options” step, select the file name (Photo 27.png in the first image) and remove it from the action (otherwise, you will get 2 attachments when this is lauched from Finder – the file you right click on AND the file you used to set up this workflow.

Click “File => “Save”.  Give the new workflow a name “Save via Email”:

Close Automator, then back to Finder.  Now let’s test the new workflow – right click on a file, “More => Automator => Send via Email” and away we go.

Note – I also tried this with a folder (Downloads) – know what?  It zipped Downloads and sent the .zip file as the attachment … From the raw message :

–Apple-Mail-1–828507478
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=Downloads.zip
Content-Type: application/zip;
x-mac-auto-archive=yes;
name=”Downloads.zip”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64