Accessing the built-in Thesaurus in Tiger’s Mail.app is easy, although one person at least didn’t know how to do it.

Place the mouse cursor over the word you would like to see synonyms for. Use the keyboard shortcut “Command+Control+D” (if you are so inclined), or Command Click on the word with your mouse (if you are not) and select “Look up in Dictionary”.

A window pops up looking like this:

At the bottom left you can choose to display the information from either the Dictionary or the Thesaurus.

Apple Mail doesn’t offer an easy way to customize the reply string in your emails. But with a little bit of courage and some careful editing, it is possible to modify the way that Apple Mail introduces quoted material in replies.

Look carefully at the following three screenshots:

The format of each reply is only slightly different, but for people who care about these things, having the wrong format is intensely annoying.

Still interested? Some hints on how to edit the string follow the jump.

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Unhappy

1. Chris McLeod at Pixel Meadow feels an undefined frustration with Apple Mail and is looking for a new mail client.
2. Pierre Igot at Betalogue is significantly annoyed at the way Apple Mail quotes text in replies.
3. Marc Chadwick at the Web Realm had a lot of trouble with Apple Mail hanging. And right after a bad breakfast too.
4. Alex King doesn’t like at all the way Mail handles signatures for multiple aliases on one account.
5. Rui Carmo at the Tao of Mac is extremely irritated by Mail’s “utterly useless Exhange support”. Thunderbird or the mail client starting with “E” beckon.
6. Bruno Rodrigues at Litux is fed up with Mail’s IMAP performance.

Happy

1. Justin Blanton loves the way Mail handles the 22,000+ emails in his inbox.
2. Michael Shaffer on the Blog of Doom is very pleased with the way Mail.app handles his spam.
3. Alex King is quite happy about the way Smart Folders let him view his mail in Apple Mail.
4. Joseph Scott is convinced that Apple Mail is “the least evil of all my evil choices for email clients on the Mac”. (That’s happy, isn’t it?)

Slightly more Yin it seems.

An anonymous poster on macOSXHints tells a sad story of button confusion. Wanting to delete a message that was too terrible to send, he or she hit the Send button instead of the red “close” bubble in the top left-hand corner of the Compose Message window.

The poster’s tip involves using the Customize Toolbar feature to move the Send button further to the right, away from the Close button.

Alternatively, getting in the habit of using “Command+W” (Close the current window) and “Command+Shift+D” (Send message) instead of the mouse should do the trick. Still a sad story though.

Love it or hate it, HTML in emails is here to stay, and people will send you HTML emails even if you ask them not to. Apple Mail can display the HTML emails you receive, although it can’t compose them.

Here are three tips for dealing with HTML email in Apple Mail depending on your level of aversion.

1. Kill HTML Completely

If you really can’t stand it, you can just banish HTML forever. Quit Apple Mail and type the following into the Terminal:

All your email will now appear in plain text. No more fancy HTML emails from Apple about the new features in .Mac for you!

2. Toggle Views

Number 1 seems too extreme to me, like King Canute standing on the seashore trying to hold back the tide. So I like to toggle.

Emails often contain the message embedded within it in a number of formats. By default Apple Mail will display the email’s HTML content first if it exists, then the Rich Text content if HTML is not available. Lastly it will display plain text is there is nothing else.

You can view the plain text version using the keyboard shortcut “Command+Option+P”, or toggle through the available formats using “Command+]” and “Command+[”

My mother, bless her, uses Outlook Express. Her emails often appear in such small text in Apple Mail, that viewing the plain text version (which OE always includes) is the only way to read her messages without squinting.

3. Turn off images in HTML emails

Spammers use images to detect real addresses. When your client starts to download an image – often an invisibly small transparent one – they know that they have found a real person. That’s bad.

In the Apple Mail Preferences go to the Viewing pane and uncheck the “Display remote images in HTML messages” option. You will have an option in the Preview Pane to download them if it turns out to be an email from someone you trust.

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

Postfix Enabler is stand-alone app that allows you to provide your own SMTP, IMAP and POP3 services with or without SSL support. It promises “a totally-functional buzzword-compliant mail server in less than a minute, the Mac Way”.

Using the SMTP functions built into OS X but turned off by default, it is useful for people who do not want to be dependent on their own ISP’s server. People who travel a lot will also find it a bonus. The production team from the TV show Survivor provide a testimonial on the developer’s web page!

The latest version is compatible with Tiger’s new way of launching services and the set-up notes contain extensive help on how to configure Apple Mail in order to use it.

It costs USD 9.99 and is available from the developer’s website.