Mac OS X Tiger comes with Automator which is, in essence, a utility designed for making applescripts (or Workflows) without actually requiring the user know applescript. With Automator comes a workflow that will find any unread mail in Mail.app and then copy that to a note on your iPod. Really handy for those (i.e., me) who have little time in the morning.

This workflow has one problem, though: it uses an action that requires Mail.app's main window to be open before starting. So to run this workflow you'd first have to open Mail.app's main window, and only then can you start the workflow, making it not quite as quick as it should be.

So, as always figuring that could be fixed, I played around with Automator a little and after some tries involving quitting Mail.app, then having it start again (which makes it show its main window), then running the actions and then closing that window again, I landed at a much more elegant solution: remove the annoying action and applescript it instead.

The result can be found here: Mail to iPod workflow

I saved it as a plug-in for my script menu, which makes it look like this when it's in action: