Kevin and I have racked our brains, small as they are, to come up with a way to Bcc the Highrise Dropbox in an automated way. We’ve spent countless hours fiddling with Apple’s Automator, and we’re still at ground zero on this. Until now that is…

While doing a little more research late last week on the topic of automatically Bcc’ing the Highrise Dropbox, I finally came across a hack for Apple Mail that does just this. I’d like to offer a big shoutout to Travis Vocino of Vocino Labs for originally sharing this out. The hack does of course require that you are comfortable with using the terminal application and entering information via the command line. ***Please read the entire post before performing the hack.*** Here is the hack:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. $ defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders
3. If nothing shows up, you don’t currently have anything set and you should be golden to move to the next step.
4. $ defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"BCC" = "dropbox@YOURDROP.highrisehq.com"; }'
5. Restart Mail.app

When I first completed the hack I was quite excited. I restarted Mail as instructed and quickly used the hot key combination command+n to create a new mail message. I was quite disappointed when the new mail message opened up and I didn’t see anything in the Bcc field. My first assumption was that perhaps since I was running a newer version of mail that the hack didn’t work. Fortunately, my trusty sidekick and business partner, Kevin Gilbert, decided to go ahead and send some test emails anyway. What we found was that the hack did in fact work, it just doesn’t place anything in the Bcc field.

A word of warning, if you use the Bcc field a lot or with any regularity, be aware that performing this hack will cause Apple Mail to only send a Bcc to the Highrise Dropbox, regardless of what you enter manually in the Bcc field. In plain English, executing this hack means that you cannot Bcc any other contact besides the Highrise Dropbox even if you manually type their email address into the Bcc field.

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1. Within your Email client, navigate to the culprit email. (That would be the one that you sent without bcc’ing your Highrise Dropbox and it should be located in your SENT folder).
2. After locating that email, hit the Forward button in preparation to forward it on to your Highrise Dropbox.
3. Before you forward the email to your Highrise Dropbox, you’ll want to go and change the From information. At present, it should show that the email was from You. You’ll want to edit this so that the email shows From the Contact or Company you wish to link it to in Highrise. Here’s how:
4. Email currently shows this information: From: Me <me@mail.com>
5. Edit this information to show the Contact name and email address that is in the Contact record in Highrise, ie: From: First Last <firstlast@mail.com>
6. Once you have edited the From information, make sure that you have entered the forwarding address to go to your Highrise Dropbox.
7. Hit the send button and then check your Highrise Dashboard. You should see the email there, linked to the Contact or Company that you specified in step 5.

Highrise is an amazingly efficient and easy to use Client Relationship Management application that is completely web based. Click the Highrise graphic above to explore Highrise in a little more depth and find out how to get your 30 day free trial. We offer Highrise Implementation and Consulting services so feel free to call on us if you need assistance.

Helpful relevant links for this post: Highrise, CRM (Client Relationship Management), Highrise Consulting Rates

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