Random Quote for Email Signatures

Published on July 16, 2012

Add a random quote to every email @macdrifter @smilesoftware @keyboardmaestro #summerblog12

I’ve been collecting quotes for a long time. I don’t know how many I have, but there are a lot of them. If I were to print out the text document that they are all saved in, it would be 34 pages.

Here are a couple random quotes:
“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” - Bill Moyers 
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” - Joseph Chilton Pierce 
“Creativity is discontent translated into arts.” - Eric Hoffer
“Things are only impossible until they’re not.” - Jean-Luc Picard
I’ve seen a lot of people put quotes at the bottom of their emails, and if they are lucky, they remember to change them every six months or so. I even get sick of my signature quotes, so I can’t imagine how those who get my emails feel. And I know I get sick of seeing the same ones on others’ emails. So, while trying to learn about something else, I stumbled across the SmileSoftware blog, and I found this particularly useful blog post. Turns out, this is really easy to implement. All you have to do is create a group called “Random” and add your quotes to that group. You don’t even have to create an abbreviation for the quotes.


Then, you create a snippet called “rrand”, or something like that. And change the content to Applescript (This part is pretty important, so don’t forget to do that.)




Then, you insert this code as the content, with “rrand” as the abbreviation:

tell application "TextExpander"

    set groupCount to count (snippets of group "Random")

set randomIndex to random number from 1 to groupCount

    return plain text expansion of ¬

        snippet randomIndex of group "Random"

end tell

That is all on the Smile blog.

The next part is what is really cool. I use Keyboard Maestro, which actually took me a long time to get into it. I found a bunch of helpful hints and helps on Macdrifter. So, I thought I would add to what I have learned from Gabe, and see if it would work.



What this does is adds a random quote to the end of my email, and then sends it when I press CMD+SHIFT+F. I chose that because I send emails in Mail.app via the shortcut CMD+SHIFT+D, and F is really close to D, so I still retain the option of not adding a quote if I don’t want to. However, it is so easy to do, that I think I will add quotes to the bottom of all my emails.

A couple geeky notes about the Keyboard Maestro Macro.

I had to choose “Type Keystroke” instead of “Insert Text” because TextExpander wouldn’t expand “rrand” unless I did the keystrokes for each letter. Also, using the “CMD+Down Arrow” keystroke forces the cursor to go to the bottom of the email, regardless of what is there. If I already have a signature, there are a few returns built into that so there is always room for a quote.

If I wanted to do this in Outlook, I would just change the last action from “Type the CMD+SHIFT+D Keystroke” to “Type the CMD+Return Keystroke”, and it would work the same way.

This was a pretty fun thing to do. As I use some of these new-to-me tools I realize how much fun it is to tweak with my computer and make it work for me.

Thanks to macdrifter, Smile Software, and Keyboard Maestro for helping me control my computer.

Have a Good Life.