Several years ago I was an AirMail user and really liked a toolbar button that, when clicked, would focus the view on only messages received from the same sender. I’ve settled on using macOS Mail.app now, but I’m searching for this same functionality.
I can approximate the same results by selecting a message in Mail and clicking the From address field menu (and choosing “Search for” in the drop down menu). This is clumsy and takes a lot of clicks and mouse movements.
Can anyone recommend a way to assign a keyboard shortcut or similar to bring only messages from the same sender in view?
That’s exactly what I’d like to do… but that option (right click sender in mail window) is not otherwise a proper menu item (addressable by System Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts). At least, I don’t think it is…
I don’t use Keyboard Maestro—can it automate this right click submenu?
If I remember correct, there is an option within Keyboard Maestro to get also Menu items like that, by placing the Mouse over those areas with a given X-Y-Adress.
I never used that, but I think @MacSparky had something like that mentioned in one of his tutorials, or was it the Field Guide?
This seems like a perfect description of what a Mail extension (plug-in) could do; unfortunately, the market for extensions is pretty small and I don’t know of any that can do this.
My guess is that Keyboard Maestro could do this, as it can replicate many mouse gestures in the most complex ways. However, I’ve never gone deep enough in this area to try something like this, so I don’t know for sure.
You might get some useful information (or indeed, even a solution) by posting on the Keyboard Maestro forums. I’m constantly amazed at what people are able to do!
… And now that I think about it further, you probably don’t need to do the somewhat tricky thing of clicking a menu item from a drop-down. You just need to grab the sender’s email address of the selected message, open a search, paste the email address, and execute the search (in a new window?). That sounds like AppleScript to me.
(Or, yikes, Shortcuts?)
You could then save the AppleScript as a Service and give it a keyboard shortcut for use in Mail. Or use Keyboard Maestro? Not sure which would be best for executing.
Either way, if AppleScript is the best answer, then the Keyboard Maestro forums may still be a good place to ask, as lots of the complex KM actions involve AppleScript. Or the Apple Stack Exchange.
