Adds "Follow Up" items to the Message and contextual menus (and optionally a toolbar button) of Apple's Mail application that allows you to compose (and then send) a quoted version of the original message to all of the original recipients, keeping the To, Cc and Bcc addresses exactly as they appeared in the original message. In keeping with Mail's built-in Reply and Reply All functionality, the plugin adds "Follow Up" (original To: recipients only) and "Follow Up All" (all original recipients) functionality via both menus and toolbar items.
1.5.4 for 10.8/Mountain Lion and later 1.5.4 might work for 10.7/Lion and later (no longer supported) 1.4.5 might work for 10.6/Snow Leopard (no longer updated/supported) 1.3.1 might work for 10.5/Leopard (no longer updated/supported)
1.1 might work for 10.4/Tiger (no longer updated/supported)
Free. If you like MailFollowUp please let me know. If you like, you can buy me a beer with the "Donate" button below and to the left.
Updates:
Sign up here if you want to be added to a mail list for MailFollowUp announcements.
If you would like to buy me a beer...
Mac and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
Screenshots
Usage
Similar to the "Reply" and "Reply All" funcionality built into Mail, once the plugin is installed (see instructions below) you should be able to select one or more messages and then choose either "Follow Up" or "Follow Up All," from either the Message or contextual menus. You can also use the keyboard shortcuts -Shift-W and -Shift-O respectively. If you initially select a portion of the text from the body of the original email, only that (quoted) text will appear in the followup. Follow Up toolbar buttons can be added via the toolbar customization panel, either as a stand-alone "Follow" or "Follow All" buttons, or in a various button groups.
I have long used Apple's Mail application, and have generally been very pleased with it. However I regularly found myself wanting to send an additional thought or comment to the original recipients of an email message, i.e. to "follow up" on the message. The "Reply All" option wasn't really what I wanted, because it would put only the original sender in the To field, and everyone else in the Cc field. This would make it seem like I was primarily addressing the original sender, and including others simply for their information. (Personally, I pay closer attention to mail that is sent "To" me than mail where I am included in the "Cc" field.)
Instead what I wanted in this case was to send a quoted "follow up" message to the original recipients, as they appeared in the original To, Cc, and Bcc fields. To accomplish this I usually did a "Reply All" and then manually moved the original To recipients from the Cc field back to the To field. This got old, and so I set out to develop a Mail application plugin that did what I really wanted. With some help from Scott Morrison (see below) I was able to develop a MailFollowUp plugin. As with my MailRecent plugin, I wrote this MailFollowUp plugin for myself, but hope that others might find it useful too.
Installation (Simple)
You can use the provided installer if you like. It essentially does the steps shown below in "Installation (Manual)".
Quit the Mail application.
Download (see above), expand, and mount the MailFollowUp disk image.
Launch (double-click) the "Install MailFollowUp" application .
Launch the Mail application again and confirm that the Follow Up menu items appear.
Sign up here if you want to be added to a mail list for MailFollowUp announcements.
If you are using OS X 10.8/Mountain Lion and having difficulties installing, please see the Known Issues page.
Installation (Manual)
These are the steps (essentially) the above installer takes. You can do them yourself if you like.
>
Quit the Mail applicat
Download (see above), expand, and mount the MailFollowUp disk im
Drag MailFollowUp.mailbundle to ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/ ("~"means a user's home directory). You might need to create the Bundles folder if it does not already exist.
If you have never used another Mail bundle, you will need to run two special commands in the Terminal application (omit the % prompt).
If you are using OS X 10.8/Mountain Lion type
Launch the Mail application again and confirm that the Follow Up menu items appear.
Sign up here if you want to be added to a mail list for MailFollowUp announcements.
Un-Installing the Plugin
Quit the Mail application.
Launch (double-click) the "Uninstall MailFollowUp" application or move ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/MailFollowUp.mailbundle to the trash.
Changing the Follow-Up Subject Prefix (Advanced)
By default MailFollowUp will leave the follow-up subject prefix as "Re: " as with a normal reply. If you would like to change the prefix to something else, for example "Follow-up: ", quit the Mail application and then run the following command in the Terminal application (omit the % prompt):
To provide maximum flexibility, the string you specify will replace all four characters of "Re: " incuding the final space. For most people the string will likely end with ": " (a colon and a space).
To return to the default follow-up subject prefix "Re: " as with a normal reply, quit the Mail application and then run the following command in the Terminal application (omit the % prompt):
Changing the MailFollowUp Menu Text and Toolbar Labels (Advanced)
If you would like to change the MailFollowUp menu item text and/or toolbar labels to something else, for example very short toolbar labels, quit the Mail application and then run the any (or all) of the following commands in the Terminal application (omit the % prompt), replacing the -string values with your desired strings:
To return to the default menu item text and/or toolbar labels, quit the Mail application and then run all of the above commands as shown in the Terminal application (omit the % prompt).
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Scott Morrison (developer of the wonderful Mail Act-On and MailTags) for help and code snippets that allowed me to develop both the MailFollowUp and MailRecent plugins. Thank you to Maurice Scharf for the French web page translation and localization help, Matthias Fichtner and Jan-Michael Frahm for the German localization help, and Paolo Boni for the Italian localization help.
MailFollowUp (Mail Plugin for Mac OS X)
-Shift-W and 
.
