Send by Email (from DEVONthink)

DEVONthink
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I have always found it odd that, for a PDF file in my database, “Send by Email” extracts the text of the PDF (with all of the inaccuracies, weird line formatting, etc. that many OCR’d PDFs have) and puts it in the body of the email, rather than attaching the file to the email. Is that really what most people want to do when sending a PDF? Note that Share doesn’t work for because I use Fmail (a FastMail wrapper app) as my default email client. But, as I understand it, the issue isn’t my choice of email client, it is something inherent in the DT action.

I know better than to ask for options to change this behavior, so I guess my real question is why this is the behavior for PDFs in the first place — I can understand why RTFs might be treated this way, but not PDFs. As things now are, I have to drag and drop the file into an email. Others have have complained about this issue in the past as well, so it might helpful to hear from those who prefer the current behavior - I just don’t get why anyone would email the entire text of a pdf with all its formatting issues.

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“Send by Email” extracts the text of the PDF (with all of the inaccuracies, weird line formatting, etc. that many OCR’d PDFs have) and puts it in the body of the email, rather than attaching the file to the email.

That is certainly not the behavior with Apple Mail… or Postbox… or MailMate.
However, there are definitely ill-behaved email applications or ones that lack such functionality.

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Ahh, I see that it works as I would have expected with Apple Mail. Sorry — I had seen other posts on the board that made me think this was the behavior across all email clients. To quote Emily Litella, “Never mind.” I’ll take it up with the Fmail developer.

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It does not here. If I select a PDF record and then “Send by Email” in the context menu, the PDF is send as an attachment to the mail.

That might explain the problem. Do you see the same if you use Apple’s Mail client?

Also, you could use Fastmail with Apple’s Mail since Fastmail supports IMAP and SMTP (same as Google Mail, for example).

1 Like
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No worries!

And in the world of email clients, there are definitely different behaviors as some don’t have good inter-application communication. Apple Mail, despite any flaws, is still the best of breed for this kind of interaction. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, you are certainly correct on all counts. I used to use Apple Mail as my FAstMail client, but switched away because I found the Fastmail interface and keyboard shortcuts a lot easier. But giving up some of the scripting benefits of Mail, and tools like this DT “Send by Email” function may be more than I bargained for. I am just going to keep an eye on how many times I need Apple Mail vs the time I save with the Fastmail interface.

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