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.html, mail.app, apple mail, composing HTML, mailpictures, safari

Similar Posts:

• Composing HTML messages in Apple Mail
• WebKit’s HTML in Mail 2.0
• Leopard Mail’s clever HTML formatting
• Setting an HTML font tag in a Mail.app message
• More TextMate Goodness: HTML emails

Tags: Apple Mail, composing HTML, HTML, mail.app, MailPictures, Safari

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 27th September, 2005 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Apple Mail. 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.