There's a lot of talk that the Combine Mail Messages action fails every time. Not true. I haven't had it fail yet. The key is you must put a Display Mail Messages Action before it in the workflow.

You'll find other useful actions quirks here.

Automator can hide files for you. It's a 1 action workflow:

Save this as a Script plug-in. Highlight the file you want to hide and control click to call up the workflow. This puts a period in front of the file name. The file will be grayed and then disappear when the finder is launched next. To hide the file immediately, you can follow this in the workflow with a Run Shell Script action to hide finder items.

The file will be in the same folder, just invisible. To view it, you'll need to to create a shell script that will show it. I have a show and hide action in my script menu and can call up these files anytime. Security is not flawless, but it's a simple step that can hide a few private files right on your desktop. They also become invisible to Spotlight.

Both the Move Finder Items action and the Copy Finder Items action have a "replace existing files" option. It doesn't make the actions redundant, as it may seem. When you check this, it replaces the existing files in the destination folder. So basically it determines whether is will overwrite a file with that same name or not.

Though Automator is all about simplicity, some of my experimental workflows can push 20 actions. "Reading" the workflow to see what it does is harder than reading code. These workflows seem fragile and occasionally an action will get misplaced and I can't easily figure where it went. That's where having a PDF printout comes in handy. When done building the workflow, just press Apple-P, click the PDF button, and choose Save As PDF. This creates a printout of the actions, insertions and order. You can maintain a notebook of hard copies of your important workflows or keep electronic versions to figure out what went where.

One of the other issues with Automator is that sometimes these workflows that were run a lot in experimenting as you built, seem to rely on old action caches that are incorrect and throw off the workflow. (One of mine would crash each time it reached a certain action.) From a printout, you can easily rebuild a virgin copy of the workflow.

The log can be useful for troubleshooting your apps, but it's not a convenient part of Automator to get to. To make it a little easier, go to the View menu and choose Customize Toolbar. Drag the log icon onto your toolbar. Now when you want to see the log, just click the button on the toolbar. Now the problem is that the log in down into the doc and not readable. Click the window plus button on the top left of Automator and window and log will both be repositioned to both be visible.

Many are shocked to find a workflow converted to an app can be substantially larger than the workflow itself: Somewhere around a meg or 2. One of my simple apps weighed in at 856K. That doesn't seem that large, but the workflow itself is only 8K. Mail a few of these to someone and you may be over their email size limit.

Why so large? When Automator builds an app, it follows a generic file structure. Inside the app package are some files you most likely will not use. If you control-click on the app's icon and open the Contents folder and the Resources folder, you'll find the "Iproj" folders. These are a basic mac app structure in 15 different languages. Most of us only need the English folder. If your app is written on a Mac using another language, you might need that language's Iproj folder to, but the rest are likely to be unnecessary. You can drag all these files to the trash. When I removed these from the app mentioned above, it shrunk to 184K. Note to delete only the excess iProj folders, nothing else.

And of course, you can use the Move to Trash action to automate the process of removing these files from your Automator apps.

I'm happy to report that Automator is not a good Spam tool. I'm sure apple designed it that way. But for many of is, there are legitimate reasons why you would want to send an email to more than one person or why you would want to resend the same email. Maybe you send the same informational email out on a regular basis. Or maybe you send out a newsletter from your Mac to multiple recipients. We've already the discussed Automator's limitation of not being able to send existing mail messages, but don't let that stop you from putting the power of mail to use. As email becomes the preferred method of business communication, Automator's Mail actions will become more and more useful.

First off, you can send an existing message. It's just not in your drafts folder. There are two ways to get content in a New Mail Message action. The first is to put the action in a workflow and type the email there. You can open the workflow and modify it before sending. The other is to pass a TextEdit document to the action.

Get Specified Finder Items (set it to the document)
Get Contents of TextEdit Document
New Mail Message

The text (but not images) will appear in the body of the email. This allows you to modify the text document so you don't have to modify text in the workflow. If you want the document itself attached to the email:

Get Specified Finder Items (set it to the document)
New Mail Message

Now the document is an attachment. Using TextEdit, you have the option of saving and sending at RTF, Word, Html, Word XML, RTFD (with images) or a WebArchive (with images).

Another option, is to send a PDF. The formatting is more stable than a TextEdit rtf or a Word doc. Apple already built this workflow for you. Open the TextEdit document and press Apple-P. This calls up the Print dialog. Click the PDF button and choose Mail PDF. The disadvantage of this method is that you can't pre-address. But you can create your own pre-addressed workflow that with turn your document into a PDF. It is called up from the same list in the print dialog. The workflow is:

New Mail Message
Send Outgoing Messages

Then save this as a Printer plug-in. You can pre-address this to a group or individuals, set the subject line and add body text. If you'd like the option to modify anything before sending, check the Show Action When Run option.

One other feature of automator is that you have two ways to mass mail: send one email to everyone. Or send an individual email to each person. To send one email to everyone, click on the Address Book icon in the New Mail Message action and choose your group. This is faster, since only one email is sent.

But if you want to send an individual email to everyone on the list, you have the option of adding an individual greeting before the text with the Group Mailer action. It also is not obvious you're sending the email to more than one person. (Using BCC will not hide this.) The disadvantage of this method is that Mail will take the time to send 100 emails individually if there are 100 in the group. When you have an attachment, this can take a while. The workflow is:

New Mail Message
Group Mailer
Send Outgoing Messages

If you want to greet each recipient in the body of the email, but don't want "Dear" in front of their name, make sure "Add Greeting" is checked, but leave the greeting field blank.