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Composing HTML messages in Apple Mail

As everyone knows, Apple Mail cannot compose HTML emails. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send them. It just means that the process is a little involved. Here are three ways to do it in OS X 10.4 Tiger.

1. Via Safari

  1. Compose a message in Dreamweaver, GoLive or the HTML editor of your choice.

  2. Save it to your Desktop.

  3. Open it in Safari

  4. Select “Mail Contents of this Page” from the File menu in Safari (or press “Command+I”).

  5. Mail 2.0 will open a new message with the HTML displayed inside it.

It’s a bit of a hassle. I wouldn’t do this everyday. But I did do it once a month for a work-related email newsletter.

2. In TextEdit

Hendy suggests another way (posted in the comments):

Or, just make a Rich Text document in TextEdit, complete with links, fonts, colours, etc. Then copy and paste into a rich text Mail message and send. If you check the source, Mail will send the message in both plain text and html formats.

But I wouldn’t want to try anything too complicated that way.

3. With the MailPictures plug-in

Die-hard hand-coders can enter raw HTML into emails – or cheat a bit by importing raw HTML from another editor – using the MailPictures plug-in. Checking the “Show options in compose window” in the Advanced section of the Mail Pictures Preference Pane enables this.

OS X 10.3 Panther users might get some joy from an AppleScript written by Andreas Amann and originally posted in the Mail Reader Reports on MacInTouch (about seven eighths of the way down the page), but zipped up and available here. Andreas provides instructions for its use in the MacInTouch post.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27th September, 2005 at 11:19 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Work-arounds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Composing HTML messages in Apple Mail”

  1. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » HTML messages in Apple Mail says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 8:57 am

    [...] The same method is outlined in this Hawk Wings tip, along with two other ways that are slightly less horrendously complicated. [...]

  2. scoop says:
    December 22nd, 2005 at 4:53 am

    I tried #1 (via Safari), and it worked great all the way up to step 5: the page (.png) appeared in the text area of my new e-mail message. but when i send it, it comes through on the other end (whether using Mail.app or webmail) as a blank e-mail (the subject heading is ok). any ideas?

  3. superposed says:
    May 1st, 2006 at 4:38 pm

    The first time I tried option #1, I used a page that had only linked pictures. (My whole reason for doing this was to send an e-mail that would show pictures pulled from the Internet, without filling the recipients’ inbox.) The outgoing message looked great in Mail, but it was delivered without the linked images. I think this is because Mail sends a message as unformatted, unless you have put in some formatted text. So I tried again, and this time I added some text in Mail before sending the message, and formatted some of the text as bold. Then, when I sent the message, it went through great, complete with the linked images.

    I also noticed that in my version of Mail (2.0.7), I can mark text, then right-click and choose “Edit link…” and type in a URL. If I also choose Format->Make Rich Text, then this link works great when the message is received.

  4. Michael Campbell says:
    June 2nd, 2006 at 12:33 am

    I also tried Option 1, and it worked great when I sent it to my desktop computer, which is running on OS 10.4. However, when I checked it on my wife’s computer, which is running OS 10.3.9, the graphic that I included on the page (a .gif file) did not display. Any thoughts?

    Thanks in advance.

  5. Jon T says:
    September 15th, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    The trouble you are having is that the images are links, not actual picture data. for that to work the links and linked to images need to be on an accessible website/webserver.

    Under some circumstances, like ‘Send Selection’ for Safari, it will incorporate the images into the actual html for the email.

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