Up until I updated to DEVONthink v3.5.2, the Send by Email toolbar button worked great. For plain text and Markdown documents, it would open my default mail application (MailMate) and paste the content into the body of the email, and set the subject to the name of the file. Now with v3.5.2, it creates a new email, but adds the Markdown or plain text document as an attachment to the email. I want the old way back. How can I get that back? I didn’t see anything mentioned about this change in the release notes.
This is an intended and requested change, multiple items can now be sent via MailMate too contrary to former releases.
I can appreciate the utility in being able to send multiple items, but it’s a shame to lose the utility of the prior method. I built a workflow out of creating Markdown documents in DEVONthink, and I would frequently need to send them as emails, not as attachments. It kills the whole thing to have those attached as .md files to an email. 
Perhaps a second toolbar button called “Send as Email Attachment” would allow for both use-cases? Plus, we already had the ability to send multiple files as attachments to a single email via the Share button. Do we really need two methods to do the same thing, especially when it comes at the expense of a different useful feature?
It’s actually a little bit funny, because I was about to suggest that the Send by Email feature be modified slightly: If it’s a plain text file, it worked great. If it’s a Markdown file, it would still set the MailMate type to plain text (even though my MailMate is configured with Markdown as the standard format for all new emails). It would be great if DEVONthink respected the MailMate setting, or at least made a different decision based on the file type.
The request is noted.
In the meantime, is there a hidden preference I can change to get the old functionality back?
No, there is no such hidden preference.
This is from four years ago, do you know if we can email a markdown document from DT and DTTG and have it format nicely for the recipient? If not, how do others accomplish this? Right now I use the drafts app but it is a quite convoluted.
Data > Send by Email sends attachments. It does not compose the body content of the email.
What does “nicely” mean? Markdown is a pure text format that doesn’t have any formatting except for newlines. If you want “nice”, you might want to convert it to HTML before sending.
Thank you for your response to my query about emailing Markdown documents from DEVONthink (DT) and DEVONthink To Go (DTTG) in a reader-friendly format. I appreciate your point about Markdown being inherently a plain text format, requiring conversion to HTML for more visually appealing presentation in emails.
Your feedback prompted me to explore alternative workflows, leading me to the “Markdown Mail” feature within the Drafts app, which indeed converts Markdown to HTML formatted emails quite efficiently. However, this method introduces additional steps into the process, involving exporting the document from DTTG to Drafts before it can be emailed.
While I understand that Markdown’s simplicity is by design, my original hope was to find a more streamlined method within DEVONthink or DTTG itself, allowing direct conversion and emailing of Markdown documents in a visually pleasing format, without necessitating the use of third-party applications.
DEVONthink can render MD as HTML (which is the original purpose of MD). Perhaps you can make a scrip that automates to your satisfaction putting that email into a mail message. But remember it requires the receiver of the email to view emails as HTML. Not everyone does.
1 Like
In addition to @rmschne’s point-on remarks:
What do you want the recipient to have? If it’s a nicely formatted something, why bother with MD at all (there’s PDF, Word, Pages, HTML – all more or less made for formatting text)? Otoh, if you need to continue working on the MD, why not send them that directly?
We’ll see what @sgbirch says about his use case. For me, I would be surprised if more than 1% of the people I routinely correspond with would have a clue how to interpret MD
4 Likes
Thanks for confirming that Markdown is actually not as widespread as many online communities assume 
2 Likes
We might add an option to convert Markdown to other formats before emailing, assuming there should be a common interest. But so far it’s the first request of its kind AFAIR.