Automating the distribution of Apple Mail Stationery in a corporate environment

I recently had to find a solution to distribute Apple Mail Stationery files to all the Macs in a company. Stationery for use with Apple Mail is normally distributed either as an attachment to an email or as a file on a disk and either way would normally be installed in each users individual home directory. Not only would this result in potentially multiple copies of the same stationery file on a single Mac but the location in a users home directory is a rather complex one looking for example like this -

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Application Support/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/Custom/

While hypothetically it might be possible to come up with a solution to both automate initial distribution of these files to each user and to distribute updates to these files to those users it seemed to me that the easiest solution was going to be to automate distributing them to each computer rather than each user especially as I was wanting to do this via Munki.

Note: This approach should equally work using similar tools like ARD, CasperSuite, etc.

The first step was therefore to locate where Apple's own included example mail stationery files were located which is…

/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/

…with multiple sub-folders to organise the different categories of stationery Apple provide. An added complexity is that Apple also use the following file as an index defining the list of categories/sub-folders

/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/TableOfContents.plist

I could have simply placed my files in one of the existing Apple folders but apart from this likely being confusing to users it may also be at risk of being wiped by Apple updates. I therefore wanted to create a sub-folder for my own files. I therefore needed to find a way to -

1. Create the sub-folder
2. Update Apple's TableOfContents if needed to include my sub-folder
3. Copy my files in to it

I accomplished this by creating a standard Apple Installer package file with a payload of my mail stationery files, and a pre-install script in the Installer package to create the sub-folder and to update the TableOfContents index. While I have chosen to use a single Installer package to install multiple mail stationery files to the same folder this approach could easily be adapted to have individual installer package files one for each stationery file.

While the TableOfContents file is a plist file it is not of a format that makes it possible to use the standard 'defaults' command to modify it - defaults is particularly weak at handling arrays, it might have been possible to use PlistBuddy but I settled on using a perl script as part of a shell script to do this.

#!/bin/sh
/bin/mkdir -p "/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/MyCompanyName/Contents/Resources/" && /bin/cp -R "/private/tmp/Mail Stationery/" "$_";
searchtableofcontents=`grep '<string>MyCompanyName</string>' "/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/TableOfContents.plist"`
if [ "$searchtableofcontents" != " <string>MyCompanyName</string>" ]; then
perl -i -pe 'BEGIN{undef $/;} s/<\/array>.*<\/plist>/\t<dict>\n\t\t<key>Folder Name<\/key>\n\t\t<string>MyCompanyName<\/string>\n\t<\/dict>\n<\/array>\n<\/plist>/smg' "/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/TableOfContents.plist";
fi
exit 0

I then added this installer package to my Munki repo to be automatically distributed to all the Macs. I can and have issued updated versions simply by creating a new updated installer package with a new version number and Munki picks this up and distributes it as an update.

Users can then see the mail stationery in Apple Mail as a separate folder in the standard list of stationery. Users do not have to be bothered by or confused by getting an email attachment and working out how to install it themselves. Furthermore this works even if a user uses more than one different Mac and even if the user leaves and someone else gets their Mac.

I can also automate uninstalling this and tidying things up by using the following matching Uninstall script in Munki.

#!/bin/sh
searchtableofcontents=`grep '<string>MyCompanyName</string>' "/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/TableOfContents.plist"`
if [ "$searchtableofcontents" == " <string>MyCompanyName</string>" ]; then
perl -i -pe 'BEGIN{undef $/;} s/\n\t<dict>\n\t\t<key>Folder Name<\/key>\n\t\t<string>MyCompanyName<\/string>\n\t<\/dict>//smg' "/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/TableOfContents.plist";
fi
exit 0

Note: The above script's If statement has exactly the number of spaces needed in it so be careful when copying it.

Note: Munki uses the package receipts list to delete i.e. uninstall the actual mail stationery files, the above script simply removes the sub-folder entry from the Apple TableOfContents file.