Fighting Spam with Automation: A Shortcut for Writing Hilarious Replies
One of the joys of Shortcuts on macOS is bending the system to your will. With a little creativity and some AppleScript, you can pull off automations that feel both absurd and brilliant. My latest project? A Shortcut that automatically drafts a brutally funny, sarcastic reply to spam and junk emails—powered by a local AI model running in LM Studio.
It’s not practical. It’s not productive. But it’s very satisfying.
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How It Works
At its core, the Shortcut is a four-part pipeline:
- Grab the Email Contents Using a short AppleScript snippet, the Shortcut fetches the subject, sender, and body of the currently selected message in Apple Mail. If no message is selected, it returns a friendly “No message selected.” To keep things stable, the Shortcut also checks if the text exceeds LM Studio’s character limit and truncates it if necessary.
tell application "Mail"
set selectedMessages to selection
if selectedMessages is not {} then
set theMessage to item 1 of selectedMessages
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
set theSender to sender of theMessage
set theContent to content of theMessage
return "Subject: " & theSubject & linefeed & "From: " & theSender & linefeed & linefeed & theContent
else
return "No message selected."
end if
end tell
Prepare the Prompt The Shortcut sets a variable for the LM Studio model ID (gemma-3-4b-it in my case) and builds a carefully worded prompt. The instructions tell the model to write a “brutally funny, insult-filled response to a spam email. Be sarcastic and creatively rude… End with an absurd, over-the-top (but never threatening) final warning.” The result is a prompt that guides the AI into crafting exactly the kind of unhinged reply you’d never actually send, but will absolutely laugh at.
Send It to LM Studio With the email contents and the prompt combined, the Shortcut makes a call to LM Studio’s local API (http://localhost:1234/v1/chat/completions). The response is parsed as JSON, and the draft text is extracted. Because it runs locally, there are no cloud services involved—everything stays private.
curl -X POST "http://localhost:1234/v1/chat/completions" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "gemma-3-4b-it",
"messages": [
{
"role": "system",
"content": "Write a brutally funny, insult-filled response to a spam email. Be
sarcastic and creatively rude (no slurs or hate speech). Make it clear I never
want to hear from them again. Reference the content of the email when possible.
End with an absurd, over-the-top (but never threatening) final warning, and a
signature that sounds unhinged yet articulate. Do Not include subject lines or
metadata."
},
{
"role": "user",
"content": "<<< email contents go here >>>"
}
]
}'
- Open in Mail’s Reply Window Finally, another AppleScript takes over: it opens a reply window to the original spam message and drops the AI-generated draft into the compose area. From here, you can either hit send (bold!) or just chuckle at the absurdity and close the window.
on run {input}
tell application "Mail"
set selectedMessages to selection
if selectedMessages is not {} then
set theMessage to item 1 of selectedMessages
set replyMessage to reply theMessage with opening window
set content of replyMessage to input
end if
end tell
end run
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Why Build This?
I won’t pretend this Shortcut is essential to my workflow. Nobody needs an AI-crafted insult generator for spam. But that’s the fun of automation: sometimes it’s about play, not productivity.
Spam clogs our inboxes daily, and most of us simply delete it. This Shortcut flips the script, giving you a mischievous outlet for all that frustration. Whether you actually send the replies or just read them for a laugh, it makes the experience of dealing with spam weirdly delightful.
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A Perfect Example of Local AI + Shortcuts
The real story here is how easily Shortcuts can integrate with local AI tools like LM Studio. By combining AppleScript’s system-level hooks with Shortcuts’ automation glue, you can build workflows that feel custom-tailored to your sense of humor—or your productivity needs.
In this case, the Shortcut isn’t saving me time or streamlining my day. But it is showcasing the power of running AI models locally, where latency is low, privacy is intact, and you can experiment with ideas that wouldn’t make sense on a cloud-based service.
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The Result
The first time I ran the Shortcut, the reply draft began with a sarcastic takedown of the email’s fake “investment opportunity,” segued into a rant about how the spammer’s grammar deserved jail time, and closed with a completely unhinged signature that read:
“Sincerely, Lord Emperor of My Inbox, Eternal Defender Against Your Nonsense.”
I didn’t send it. But I laughed harder than I have at an email in years. And that’s exactly the point.
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Bottom line: Not every Shortcut has to be practical. Sometimes, the best ones are the ones that bring you joy—even if that joy comes from imagining a spammer’s reaction to an AI-written roast they’ll never actually read.
Write Reply to Spam & Junk Email
