Hi,
I try to collect all IMAP Folders in Apple Mail and I want the complete folder paths. With this code I get all the references to the mailboxes:
tell application "Mail"
set folders to mailboxes
repeat with theAccount in accounts
set folders to folders & mailboxes of theAccount
end repeat
return folders
end tell
The entries don’t have a property with the path, but Script Debugger shows me this result. How to get the highlighted part of the objects with AppleScript?
Each mailbox can get parent mailbox.
So, you can go up to root.
Thanks, I already tried it, but building a list of 286 folders is quite slow with 4 seconds. Maybe this can be optimized? I thought it would be faster to access the information which seems to be already there.
tell application "Mail"
set folders to mailboxes
repeat with theAccount in accounts
set folders to folders & (mailboxes of theAccount)
end repeat
set allPaths to {}
repeat with theFolder in folders
set thePath to ""
set subFolder to theFolder
repeat
try
set thePath to name of subFolder & "/" & thePath
set subFolder to container of subFolder
on error
exit repeat
end try
end repeat
try
get name of account of theFolder
on error
set thePath to "Local/" & thePath
end try
set allPaths to allPaths & {characters 1 thru -2 of thePath as string}
end repeat
end tell
Execution speed depends on how many messages and mailboxes and the depth of each mailboxes.
My Mail.app env store hundreds of mailing lists.
My M1 Mac mini + macOS 13.6 env’s result with 286 mailboxes:
Your logic (+ little fix): 32.01 sec
My logic : 29.01 sec
Your logic (+ full speed update): 19.32
These scripts calculate full Mail box path from selected mailboxes.
This is not a strict benchmark. But after some times execution, this trend is reasonable for me.
Generally speaking, your script is not so slow.
Thanks for the improvements, Piyomaru. That’s great.
Why does storing the arrays in a script speed up the execution?
Reading huge list take a long time.
This figure is from my book “AppleScript speed up technics”
Direct list access take a long time. And indirect list access is faster than direct.
I don’t know about the mechanism. AppleScript’s array (list) can store various object.
So, its address calculation took a long time, I think.
We experienced this phenomenon in Classic MacOS era (a reference to).
Storing list in script object is new technic in Mac OS X era.
Normal list access script took 15 secs with my M1 Mac mini
use AppleScript version "2.4"
use scripting additions
use framework "Foundation"
property aList : {}
set a1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set aList to {}
repeat with i from 1 to 30000
set the end of aList to i
end repeat
repeat with i in aList
set aStr to i as string
end repeat
set b1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set c1Dat to (b1Dat - a1Dat)
--> 15.198549985886
Indirect list access (a reference to) took 0.44 secs
use AppleScript version "2.4"
use scripting additions
use framework "Foundation"
property aList : {}
set a1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set aList_ref to a reference to aList
set aList to {}
repeat with i from 1 to 30000
set the end of aList_ref to i
end repeat
repeat with i in aList_ref
set aStr to i as string
end repeat
set b1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set c1Dat to (b1Dat - a1Dat)
--> 0.439829945564
property in script object is the fastest access. It took 0.39 secs
use AppleScript version "2.4"
use scripting additions
use framework "Foundation"
script hgs
property aList : {}
end script
set a1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set (aList of hgs) to {}
repeat with i from 1 to 30000
set the end of (aList of hgs) to i
end repeat
repeat with i in (aList of hgs)
set aStr to i as string
end repeat
set b1Dat to current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()
set c1Dat to (b1Dat - a1Dat)
--> 0.38650393486
Thanks a lot for sharing this. Very interesting.
That’s great info, thanks. The speed difference is indeed huge in your example.
Could reproduce the same results on my side, too.
I never knew about it. It also made me wonder why I never experienced any kind of noticeable delay when iterating through lists using the direct access.
I guess I just never had to deal with lists that contain thousands (let alone tens of thousands) of objects.
I ran some additional tests and it looks like that humanly noticeable difference in speed starts from about 4000 objects in your example.
Developer of the MsgFiler application for macOS here. There’s a much faster way to access the full path of mailboxes without having to go through the mailbox container hierarchy. It involves deliberately throwing an error when accessing a mailbox. The error message contains the full path to the mailbox.
Check out the following code which iterates through mailboxes in all accounts and the local On My Mac account.
tell application "Mail"
set theList to {}
set {TID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, quote}
-- All Accounts
repeat with a in accounts
repeat with m in mailboxes of a
try
m as rich text
on error e
set mailboxName to text item 2 of e
set theList to theList & mailboxName
end try
end repeat
end repeat
-- On My Mac
repeat with m in mailboxes
try
m as rich text
on error e
set mailboxName to text item 2 of e
set theList to theList & mailboxName
end try
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TID
return theList
end tell
Late thanks for this suggestion. It much faster and less complicated.
May I ask you, how you move the selection within mail in MsgFiler? I tried it with AppleScript without success. Well, I messed around with set selected messages of message viewer 1 to ….
Hi.
It would be even faster to throw just one error for each list of mailboxes:
set theList to {}
tell application "Mail"
set accountsMailboxes to accounts's mailboxes
set macMailboxes to its mailboxes
end tell
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to quote
-- All accounts.
repeat with a in accountsMailboxes
try
a as text
on error e
set tis to e's text items
repeat with i from 2 to (count tis) by 6
set my theList's end to my tis's item i
end repeat
end try
end repeat
-- On My Mac.
try
macMailboxes as text
on error e
set tis to e's text items
repeat with i from 2 to (count tis) by 4
set my theList's end to my tis's item i
end repeat
end try
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TID
return theList
Wohooo, that’s really fast. Thanks for sharing.
And here for interest is an alternative hack which seems to work. It’s intermediate in speed between Adam’s suggestion and my development of it and doesn’t use as much code:
tell application "Mail"
set accountsMailboxes to accounts's mailboxes
set macMailboxes to its mailboxes
end tell
set theList to {}
repeat with a in my accountsMailboxes
repeat with m in a
set my theList's end to (m as record)'s «class seld»
end repeat
end repeat
repeat with m in my macMailboxes
set my theList's end to (m as record)'s «class seld»
end repeat
return theList
That’s great und looks clean. How to access the “from” property with the account id? This does not work:
set my theList's end to (m as record)'s from
I don’t know. 
But it’s not necessary. The account ids can be got by normal means. Something like this:
tell application "Mail"
set {accountIDs, accountsMailboxes} to accounts's {id, mailboxes}
set macMailboxes to its mailboxes
end tell
set theList to {}
repeat with i from 1 to (count accountIDs)
set suffix to " of account id " & accountIDs's item i
repeat with m in my accountsMailboxes's item i
set my theList's end to (m as record)'s «class seld» & suffix
end repeat
end repeat
repeat with m in my macMailboxes
set my theList's end to (m as record)'s «class seld»
end repeat
return theList
Ah, thanks. The solution was probably too obvious for me. 
(Sorry, bit of a newby to Apple Scripting). I’ve tried this script, but the error message I get seems to be entirely different from the one you have been processing. I get
Can’t make {«class asDB» id (application “Mail”) of «class mbxp» “Drafts” of «class mact» id “83C1508D-AEC1-47AB-9367-52F7F2E3AD16” of application “Mail”, «class asDB» id (application “Mail”) of «class mbxp» “INBOX” of «class mact» id “83C1508D-AEC1-47AB-9367-52F7F2E3AD16” of application “Mail”, «class asDB» id (application “Mail”) of «class mbxp» “Sent Messages” of «class mact» id “83C1508D-AEC1-47AB-9367-52F7F2E3AD16” of application “Mail”} into type text.
I’m using Apple Mail 14.0 on Big Sur 11.6.7.
I can see that the path is inside the mailbox object, but (1) it is only the path to the outer folder, not the actual mailbox, and (2) I can’t get it to work - I tried the fragment below, and it says it can’t get the container.
set theList to {}
tell application "Mail"
set accountsMailboxes to accounts's mailboxes
set macMailboxes to its mailboxes
end tell
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to quote
-- All accounts.
repeat with a in accountsMailboxes
repeat with b in a
set y to container of b
set z to account of container of b
set x to POSIX path of account of container of b
end repeat
Finally, and sorry it is such a newb question, but in the later examples in this question, what does <> do, because I can’t find references to that in the scripting docs?
Many thanks.
Hi @kulath.
The scripts above return POSIX-like paths to the mailboxes within the Mail application and work with Mail 16.0. Do they not work with Mail 14.0 or are you trying to get the paths to where the mailboxes are stored on disk?
As far as I can see, Mail itself will only return the disk folder for an account. To get it, you need to get the account’s account directory, which is returned in the form of a file specifier. If you want it as a POSIX path, you have to get this as a separate operation (ie. not included in the specifier that gets the file from the account, because a POSIX path isn’t a Mail object).
set x to account directory of account of container of b
set x to POSIX path of x
-- Or:
set x to POSIX path of (get account directory of account of container of b)
-- Not:
set x to POSIX path of account directory of account of container of b
In my single-account set up, the account folder only contains subfolders for five default mailboxes. The “On my Mac” folders are in a sibling folder to the account folder which isn’t the “MailData” one.
I presume you mean the chevron characters “«” and “»”. They and whatever they enclose represent tokens that haven’t been given corresponding keywords — usually because they’re not intended to be used in scripts! In the scripts above, the hack of coercing Mail’s mailbox objects to records happens to work and returns records that have such tokens as property labels. Hope this makes sense.
Thanks very much for the answer @NigelGarvey
The script that relies on throwing an error which is caught and then processed by getting every sixth item doesn’t work on Mail 14 because the error message thrown is the one I show, which must be different than that in Mail 16.
I was indeed wanting to get the path to where the mailbox is stored on disk.
I think my initial attempts didn’t work because it seems that I have to have the processing within the “tell application Mail”, and it works when I use explicit bracketing, like this
tell application "Mail"
set accountsMailboxes to accounts's mailboxes
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to quote
-- All accounts.
repeat with mailboxlist in accountsMailboxes
repeat with themailbox in mailboxlist
set accountid to account of themailbox
set thedirectory to account directory of (account of themailbox)
set thepath to POSIX path of (account directory of (account of themailbox) as string)
set x to do shell script "ls -lr " & thepath
display dialog x
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
This now works, but isn’t quite what I want.
However, as you say, it only seems to be possible to get the disk folder for an account . In the example, I have three folders in the account (INBOX, Drafts and Sent Massgaes or something) and hence the above gives the three paths (for the account) three times, but not the path to the specific INBOX directory (or whatever).
But what I actually want is the POSIX path to the mailbox I have selected in the Mail sidebar. I have got
set theList to {}
tell application "Mail"
set theviewer to message viewers
set sel to selected mailboxes of message viewer 1
This works fine to get the selected mailbox “on My Mac” which happens to be Mailboxes/Friends/family/joe". But this mailbox On My Mac does not have an account, so even if account gives the right mailbox paths for that mailbox, this would be no good because the mailbox On My Mac doesn’t have an account! So I don’t know how to get the path of a mailbox - the original question!
Finally, my question about the double chevrons (which were munged by the markup) was about what class seld meant, but I now understand that was just a placeholder, thanks.
HI kulath.
This gets the POSIX path to the disk storage for a selected “On My Mac” mailbox on my machine. What you do with the storage is entirely your own responsibility! I don’t know if fooling with it can be recommended or not.
-- Get the POSIX path of the disk folder for "On My Mac".
set OnMyMacFolderPath to POSIX path of getOnMyMacFolder()
-- Get the path within Mail of the (first) selected mailbox.
tell application "Mail"
set theMailbox to item 1 of (get selected mailboxes of message viewer 1)
set mailboxPath to «class seld» of (theMailbox as record)
end tell
-- Derive the equivalent relative disk path, each mailbox folder having the name extension ".mbox".
set relativeDiskPath to replaceText(mailboxPath & "/", "/", ".mbox/")
-- Join the two parts of the path.
set mailboxFolderPath to OnMyMacFolderPath & relativeDiskPath
on getOnMyMacFolder()
-- The folder on disk for "On My Mac" is in the same folder as the account folders.
-- It's the one whose name isn't one of the account IDs or "MailData".
tell application "Mail"
set namesToIgnore to (id of accounts) & "MailData"
set anAccountfolder to account directory of account 1
end tell
tell application "Finder"
set accountContainer to container of (anAccountfolder as alias)
return (first folder of accountContainer whose name is not in namesToIgnore) as alias
end tell
end getOnMyMacFolder
on replaceText(txt, find, replace)
set astid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to find
set textItems to txt's text items
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to replace
set txt to textItems as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid
return txt
end replaceText