This is really tricky and way too complicated on my opinion for a user to understand what he or she has to to in order to create an Apple Mail template.

I have downloaded a PDF from Apple’s website which is called “MailArticles.pdf”

I would like the template to insert the “Full Name” from an Address Book entry or the current date in a specific format.

It would be nice to have some kind of “Inspector palette” in Apple Mail. e.g. for editing the values for “links”, “urls” and “images” for example which would make it much easier for creating a web standards compliant email template.

— excerpt from Apple documentation —
Dynamic elements are placeholders that can be inserted in the HTML of the stationery. When the stationery
is loaded into the New Message window, the dynamic element is replaced by static content. A dynamic
element is specified in the HTML by a SPAN element with the class name AppleStationeryDynamicElement.
Any HTML contained in the SPAN element is discarded when the stationery is loaded except when desired
content cannot be inserted. On these occasions, the contents of the SPAN is displayed. The span tag must also have a apple-content-type attribute that specifies what the replacement content should be. For
example, a value of full-name for apple-content-type specifies that the dynamic element should be
replaced by the user’s full name. The following values for apple-content-type are available:

full-name User’s full name from the Me card in Address Book.
first-name User’s first name from the Me card in Address Book.
email The email address of the account being used to send the message.
date The current date.

A dynamic element of type date must also have a date-format attribute. Its value is a format string as
used by Cocoa’s NSCalendarDate class.Creating Mail Stationer y Bundles
—

This is way too cryptic Apple folks.

I would like to create my own html/css email templates in a web editor such as GoLive or Dreamweaver. Import the files in Apple Mail and set the properties and placeholder image files in Apple mail.

The mail templates should be located in

user/Documents/Mail/Stationery

on my opinion. It is not very user-friendly to “hide” these important douments somewhere in the rather complicated system file structure.

My 2c,

graphically & sincerely,

Marc Klein

There is a work-around.

Compose in TextEdit. There’s a lists widget in its toolbar. When you’ve finished your message, highlight it, and select

TextEdit > Service > Mail > Send Selection

I would like to use css in the header to set text styles rather than have to set these manually each time.

I’d and also some header and footer setup for corporate branding. I know it is possible to do footer using signatures, but I’d like more access to layout and text styles for everyday email.

Suggestions re Thunderbird are great, but I want to stick with Mail because of its integration with our CRM – Daylite.

Thanks

Richard
PS: I wish there was an easy way to add bullet points in Mail. Using * for bullets is very primitive…

I don’t, but if you look at the linked gallery, you’ll see that all the samples shown are postcard-like templates suitable for personal notes to friends. I’d suggest that would make editing them to use them for another purpose–such as a newsletter, as you mention–likely more time-consuming than starting afresh.

“The most obvious things I’d be interested in setting up would be html footers for emails …”

The simplest way to implement that would be with the “Signatures” setting in Mail.

“… a series of CSS styles for text”

That’s more problematic. One tends to think that because these are such a boon for web use, they are _ipso_ _facto_ a “good thing”. But support for CSS in email clients is patchy to say the least. It’s only really inline styles that are usable. And you couldn’t realistically use CSS for layout; you’d have to use tables, if you had layout requirements. There’s more information here:

http://www.anandgraves.com/html-email-guide

Mozilla’s Thunderbird would be a better tool if you want both to work with raw markup and to use email templates. You can open a composing view and insert tags directly, if you want. And you can certainly save templates you make in Thunderbird.

But you certainly _could_ take a template-like approach with Mail.app. What you could do is to save your template as an HTML page rather than as a mail message. You could write such a page either in any HTML editor or in a text editor, just as for the web. Then, when the time came to send the newsletter, you’d re-open the “template” page in your editor and add the current content. You could then open your completed HTML page in Safari and send its contents to Mail.app in one of two ways:

Either:

1. Press Command + I

Or:

2. Press Command + A (select all) then select Safari > Services > Mail > Send Selection

The HTML that’s produced varies slightly according to which method is used.

With the latter method you can also compose in TextEdit in rtf rather than in HTML, and send to Mail.app through the Services Menu. It gets converted to HTML just the same as if you’d started with HTML. It’s quite a simple method. Any images you drag into TextEdit go with the email. If you preferred to use remote images, you’d use the first method, being sure to give the full path to the images on the web in your image links in your HTML source.

With Thunderbird, you make the choice of what to do with images by using a “moz-do not send” or “moz send” attribute when you compose.

To summarize: I don’t think those templates would be a good place to start, but you could do what you want with Thunderbird templates. And you could also, effectively, do this right now in Tiger’s version of Mail: you’d just have to save your template as an HTML page, not a mail message. Rendering is a problematic area, but if you keep the design simple, it will probably work for all your recipients, and you could test first to see.

It’s not something I regularly do myself, but I’ve experimented in order to see what the capabilities of the software are just out of curiosity. It’s doable.

Does anyone know if the templates can be easily edited…

The most obvious things I’d be interested in setting up would be html footers for emails, as well as a series of CSS styles for text.

Ideally we could use simple heading styles: h1 h2 etc

Why? Response rates for email newsletters are considerably higher with images, and icons. And even in non-newsletters, why not have nice-looking email to send to clients. Consistent text styling would be fantastic. Not all html-email is spam.

Richard

Never debate with a fool. The fool gets the attention he craves, and you’ll get frustrated trying to explain things to him that he is unable to grasp.

Sorry, I forgot that.

> I don’t.

Then the comment was irrelevant in the first place. That would only be a consideration if one were. And the point of the comment was that, while there are some (almost inherent problems) with the use of HTML for email (mostly connected with its uncertain rendering for the foreseeable future) *this* is not one of them. It is not an inherent problem.

And the point is also that if you had read the whole thread, you would have known that the point had already been extensively discussed. If you can’t contribute anything new, why say anything at all?

> poor innocent, ignorant Windows users do on Internet Explorer

That is a browser not a mail client. Some Windows clients do use IE’s rendering engine, but for quite a long time (some *years*) they’ve been using the restricted zone, which does *not* run JavaScript.