Creating service to insert text into email message

If you're not wedded to implementing this yourself, the TextExpander tool offers this capability, and you can also enable and use the text substitutions mechanism within mail to implement snippets substitution; boilerplate responses. And there are other alternatives. There are also some support tools available which pre-scan mail for FAQs, depending on the volume of messages arriving.

The following service seems to do what you are asking for:

Here's the script:

set theFolder to (path to documents folder as text) & "Replies:" as alias

set theFile to choose fileof type "txt" default locationtheFolder

set the clipboard to (readtheFileasUnicode text)

tell application "Mail" to activate

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "v" using {command down}

Message was edited by: Pierre L.

Many thanks for your feedback, Martin.

You're right: the correct statement should have been simply

set the clipboard to (readtheFile)

I'm glad that you were able to fix the encoding issue.

That's my bad! The problem is that I tested the script with plain text files made with TextEdit and saved using the Unicode (UTF-16) plain text encoding. The default Unicode (UTF-8) encoding used by TextEdit doesn't seem to be able to cope with characters such as "à" or "é", unavoidable in French, which it saves as "√†" and "√©" in plain text files.

Of course, I could have avoided the issue if I only had created the text files like follows:

set F to open for accesstheFile with write permission

write "a à e é" to F

close accessF

Message was edited by: Pierre L.

You could make the service appear in the contextual menu by selecting “text” (the default choice, actually) in the “Service receives selected” drop-down menu, instead of “no input”. However, the service will then appear only if some text is selected, and not with just the insertion point.

Btw, maybe I should have told you I know practically nothing about Automator and services. I use AppleScript with the Script Menu. 😕

Message was edited by: Pierre L.