Creativebits has blogged one of the horrendously convoluted ways to send HTML messages in Mail.app.

The same method is outlined in this Hawk Wings tip, along with two other ways that are slightly less horrendously complicated.

If you really have to do this, MailPictures is the way to go, in my view.

Or if you really need to do this often, you could use Direct Mail or some other bulk mailing app, many of which support composing in raw HTML and integrate with Address Book.

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