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
- Compose a message in Dreamweaver, GoLive or the HTML editor of your choice.
- Save it to your Desktop.
- Open it in Safari
- Select “Mail Contents of this Page” from the File menu in Safari (or press “Command+I”).
- 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.
Fabulous. Option 1 was exactly what I was looking for, and actually is a synch if you’ve done any html work before… Cheers!
Thanks so much for this… I’ve been scouring the web for days trying to learn how to do this simply. I’ve tried thunderbird, and have been all through the mail prefs etc and finally I find your site and the solution is in Safari. Once again Cheers from Australia…
Andrew
what about sending images in an html email. im trying to send an animated gif.
Thanks so much! works perfectly.
You saved my day! As Duncan and Andi pointed out, the Safari option is a snap. No specialty software required… great! I’ll be sending out my newsletters soon… Note: Have you noticed that Mail has the option “Paste as HTML” under Edit menu, but it’s always grayed out…? go wonder…
This was Awesome! Thanks so much! I am so glad I found this.
You really made the day!
Nice one. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, you just saved me so much time!!!!!!
Thank you! This solves my problem. I’ve been battling with this for days.
Thank you! This made my day so much easier!
You are an angel. Thank you thank you thank you!!!