Leopard Mail HTML Stationery Gallery
I’m not sure how long this has been up on the Apple web site. I’ve never noticed it before.
Apple has created a preview 
of the HTML Stationery that will be available in Leopard Mail.
As regular readers of Hawk Wings will already expect, I’m not big fan. But don’t let that rob you of the pleasure you’ll no doubt get from exploring the kinds of productivity leaps that Leopard Mail will offer.
The nine examples fall into standard stationery categories — thank-yous, news, get well soon messages, invitations, Valentine’s Day and so on.
Here are just two examples of what we can look forward to, a thank-you and a Birthday email:
“Mail. You’ve got more”, reads the tag line on the Apple web site.
Never a truer word.
Tags: Apple Mail, email, HTML, leopard mail, mail.app, oh dear, stationeryRelated posts
January 24th, 2007 at 1:00 am
If you want higher-quality, one you click the image you want to see, drag it into the URL bar, and voila.
January 24th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Actually, I think both of those look tacky - something like a postcard with a random sheet of wallpaper behind it.
Although I’m more a plain-text guy, I’ve been playing around with HTML mail in Mail.app on Tiger. I’ve come to the conclusion that the easiest way to compose HTML mail is to use TextEdit in combination with the Services Menu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Services_menu
1. Set Mail to send “rich text” (Apple’s misnomer for HTML).
2. Compose as you wish in TextEdit (obviously different font-families and colors are available, as are bulleted lists; and images may be inserted via drag-and-drop).
3. Press Command + A (for select all)
4. Go to the menu bar and choose:
TextEdit > Services > Mail > Send Selection
TextEdit’s native rtf (or rtfd) format gets converted to passable - not good but certainly passable - HTML. (In fact, you get no cleaner HTML if you actually write in HTML, open your document in Safari, and pass it to Mail through the Services menu.)
Come a special occasion, why not write an attractive message as HTML mail? But spare me Leopard Mail’s canned, and rather ugly, messages. What’s the point when, if someone didn’t want to compose something original, he could send more interesting “ecards” than these via a web-service? Here’s just one example:
http://www.bbcwildlifemagazine.com/ecards.asp
January 24th, 2007 at 2:54 am
…or you can click on the images at the bottom of the screen ;-)
PS this mail feature leaves me cold. I am not a big fan of html mail. But for some it will be nice eye candy. Better that apple concentrate on fixing the many bugs that has begun to creep into the Mail.app, and to make it more stable and feature rich in terms of managing our emails.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:32 am
My own views on this sort of thing are:
http://www.renhip.com/blog/2007/01/23/business-graphics/
January 24th, 2007 at 4:40 am
walter - I meant for bigger versions! :)
January 24th, 2007 at 5:01 am
So where are the graphics for these templates hosted? At Apple? Encoded into the email?
January 24th, 2007 at 5:37 am
ok matty… needed an extra coffee. thx =8-)
January 24th, 2007 at 9:40 am
If HTML means these “eye-candy” things, then I neither need nor want it.
I do have a real use for some basic formatting such as bold text or bullet lists. It’s just a shame that Mail is so flaky at doing this, and that the connection from TextEdit is not completely reliable.
January 25th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Great, so not only will this garbage bloat up my inbox, but it’s gonna bloat up my hard drive now, too.
I hate Apple.
Mike: a better way to do it is to open your HTML file in Safari and hit command-i. I think it’s something like”Send page contents” under the file menu. I have to send HTML mails for work sometimes. :’(
I hate work.
January 25th, 2007 at 6:38 am
Apple makes great products, but their templates suck in 90% of the cases.
Look at those leopard mail templates.. ick.
Also check most of the iPhoto album templates, iDVD templates, Pages templates and Keynote templates. Oh, and I forget iWeb. All tacky over-the-top templates. Usually only 2 or 3 are worth using and can be viewed without getting a headache in 5 minutes…
January 25th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Different, Brian. I don’t know about better.
If you do it that way Mail.app puts an illegal “BASE href” in the body of the message. It also looks to me that if you do use that method, Mail won’t send a local image if you refer to one. (It would, of course, be happy with a remote image).
I don’t think either method is really satisfactory. Tim was spot on awhile back when he said that Thunderbird does HTML mail better than Mail does. I’ve even found you can use indentation and leading with embedded CSS and Thunderbird will send it with no problem.
Mail’s HTML is OK - I’ve seen far worse - but it’s not good.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Ah, well that is something I did not know.
I’m not too familiar with RTF, but I didn’t think it gave you nearly as much freedomas HTML does. Mayhaps it does. Nice to have more than one way to do it (when you’re forced).
January 25th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Ah, when you send it to Mail.app via the Services Menu the rtf (or rtfd) gets converted to HTML.
Further to that, what I found, and what surprised me, is that if you write HTML by hand youself in a plaintext editor, such as TextMate, save it as an HTML document, open it in Safari, and send *that* via the Services Menu the HTML that ends up in Mail is no cleaner.
But another curious thing is that if you try to copy-and-paste from TextEdit to Mail it doesn’t work very well. the Services Menu seems to be the way to go.
January 26th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Man, you just got me all kinds of confused. :D I think I’ll just use something else when I need to send HTML mail from now on.
January 28th, 2007 at 2:20 am
I do think Leopard’s Mail.app’s templates have their place - special occasions and what-not. Certainly not for everyday mail.
I’m curious about compatibility with Outlook 2007, which sent HTML email viewing into the dark ages:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8619.html
Has anyone sent these templates to Outlook 2007 to test?
February 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 pm
What’s all the fuss about html email, otherwise known as the devil’s spawn? As far as I can tell most people prefer plain text emails anyway - and those templates are soooooh awful!
I’m on the Apple User Group mailing list, and last year someone asked what email format we would prefer - text or html. The response was 9 to 1 in favour of plain text.
If you can’t create it in Mail.app - good! That’s less for me then. But if you really must send some, Thunderbird already allows you to create email in html format. It just works. Not like this Apple Mail.app thingy.
I think Apple’s losing it’s way with all this eye candy stuff. Not as much perhaps as Vista, but their template designs for most apps are just too flowery, too frilly, too unsophisticated!
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
“What’s all the fuss about html email … ”
Do you mean, “Why do some people wish to send it?”
Their reasons vary. As one poster explained above, he sometimes needs to place text with respect to images. That can’t be done with plain text email.
“Thunderbird already allows you to create email in html format”
So does Mail. The code it produces is not quite so clean, but it writes it all right. But Mail’s HTML code looks more backwards-compatible to me; so it’s possible that it may render better in some older clients at the other end.
Interestingly, I was recently sent an HTML mail with an imbedded image from Pegasus Mail and Thunderbird wouldn’t render it properly. However, Mail would. Examing the raw source I can see that the HTML Pegasus is sending is good. It’s a form of XHTML 1.0 and well-formed but, like Mail’s, quite backwards-compatible (one suspects that’s been found to be necessary). It looks to me to that the problem might be that Pegasus is sending the image with the MIME type application/octet-stream. A glitch in Pegasus? Or a mistake in the way it had been used? But anyway, Mail.app copes.
I think it’s fair to say that examples like this show that (1) the content of HTML email varies and (2) its rendering is a bit of a crap shoot. On the other hand, it suits some people’s purposes - like the guy who needed to place his text wrt images.
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:03 am
Spammers love html email as they can include an image file located on their server; when this is downloaded it tells them that particular email address is valid and active. They can also link to Javascript that can help them take over your computer (well, a Windows computer anyway) and have it do other nasty things too.
Apart from all that, each email sent (or more to the point, received) takes up far more disk space than necessary, and often the very salesy html emails are even harder to read and take longer to decide to junk.
If you are working in graphics I can maybe understand why you might want to send an email with text positioned, but the graphic designer we work with sends pdf files as these are more accurate representations anyway.
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:19 am
While I have personal disdain for HTML email (mostly for wasting space/bandwidth) there’s a reality that decent people send it, and decent people enjoy receiving it. My clients are ad agencies and they send HTML email to client lists all the time (opt-in active customer lists with easy unsubscribe). I also help non-profits send similar emails, and the response is much better with attractive content.
At the same time, I *always* set up Macs with the “Display remote images in HTML messages” off, and train users to only load the images for legit emails. I’m finding that true spammers aren’t using the remote-loading code much any more. They just blast the stuff everywhere using drone PCs, easier to send everywhere instead of track real addresses. Not 100%, but probably 90-95%.
February 3rd, 2007 at 3:35 am
“Spammers love html email as they can include an image file located on their server”
Why would you use a mail client that automatically displays remotely linked images?
“They can also link to Javascript that can help them take over your computer”
Why would you use a mail client that runs JavaScript?
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:50 am
I don’t.
It’s not what you or I do, but what all those poor innocent, ignorant Windows users do on Internet Explorer - which still has an 85% market share. They catch the virus, they spread the virus. We don’t catch the virus, but the whole internet slows down, and that slows us down.
It’s like we don’t get a cold, but we still have to wipe off the snot other people spread around. Reminds me of that Get A Mac ad “virus”.
February 3rd, 2007 at 9:14 pm
> > Why would you use a mail client that runs JavaScript?
> 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.
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:40 pm
No, you’re absolutely right, there are no viruses, Windows doesn’t have a security problem, malware, adware and spyware don’t take advantage of html email to spread themselves, only the Greeks have a problem with Trojans. While the intelligent Windows users have no problems, it is the ignorant ones who just mess up their own computers.
Sorry, I forgot that.
February 4th, 2007 at 1:10 am
I said none of the above. Moreover, none of this has anything to do with the topic of this thread: “Leopard Mail HTML Stationery Gallery”.
February 4th, 2007 at 2:04 am
HTML email is the common ingredient. But I’ll let you have the last word.
February 4th, 2007 at 2:25 am
HMTL is mark up not code. Look it up.
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.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Hi,
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
March 20th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
“Does anyone know if the templates can be easily edited…”
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.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
If anyone has access to the Leopard beta, it would be interesting to know if html templates can be created or are you restricted to the installed templates? Can the installed templates be easily modified?
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…
June 12th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
“I wish there was an easy way to add bullet points in Mail. Using * for bullets is very primitive…”
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