From Mac OS X Hints.com - Get the most from X - [url=http://www.macosxhints.com/]http://www.macosxhints.com/[/url]
I love ending my emails with a witty saying or neato quote, so for the past year now, I’ve been composing my emails, then opening up a Terminal window and copy-pasting the output from fortune into the message before sending. There is a much better way of doing this, of course! Open up Script Editor and create this script (note you have to replace /path/to/fortune with the path to the fortune installation on your system).
Save this in ~/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts (you may have to create this folder). Open up Mail and select ‘Update Scripts Menu’ from the Scripts menu (the AppleScript icon between ‘Window’ and ‘Help’). Now select the name of the script you just created and boom! Fortuned email sigs!
If you want to take this one a step further, use MenuMaster, iKey, etc. and assign the script a key combination (such as Cmd-Opt-Shift-N, for instance).
If you use fink, you can install fortune by typing sudo apt-get install fortune-mod. If you do so, your path to fortune is /sw/bin/fortune. You can also assign a hot key by naming the script a certain way – ‘Fortune___ctl-cmd-f.scpt’ for instance, will assign it Control-Command-F. This script creates a new mail message, so don’t start typing one and then call the script; call the script first…
OS version: OS X
tell application "Mail"
activate
make new outgoing message with properties ¬
{content:do shell script "/path/to/fortune", visible:true}
end tell