I write in Arial - It arrives as Times New Roman

LOswego wrote:
Folks, I'm pretty sure this is a Mac flaw, not Windows!!!

Yes. I know. That is why I just wrote four bug reports against Apple Mail.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SETTINGS IN OUTLOOK FOR HTML MAIL. (Sorry for my shouting.)

On the contrary, it has everything to do with Outlook. There exist a set of standards that define how data is supposed to be exchanged (pun not intended) over the Internet. Apple, Mozilla, and pretty much everyone follows these standards - except Microsoft. Microsoft defines their own set of standards and, because they control so much of the market, everyone has to toe the line.

Everyone know how bad Internet Explorer is. You can't go to a bookstore and buy books on HTML and CSS and just design web pages because they will look like some kind of bad Picasso picture on 70% of the computers in the world. You have to code around Microsoft bugs.

The same thing is true for e-mail. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HTML E-MAIL (I don't apologize for the shouting). This is a Microsoft invention. Apple actually ripped out their standards-compliant code from Apple Mail in order to make e-mail messages work better on Outlook. Yes, there are some bugs in Apple's implementation. Yes, they haven't fixed them in three years. For whatever reason, apparently no one has noticed until now. I've written bug reports on it. It would probably help to send <a href=""http://www.apple.com/feedback/" target="_blank">Feedback to Apple as well.

But not, this is not a "Mac flaw", this is typical Microsoft hegemony at work. How come no one complains that Outlook cannot properly display true MIME richtext messages? That standard was documented in 1993. But now suddenly Apple is the bad guy because their hacked up code to support Microsoft's hacked up code isn't 100% perfect.

I don't know if the bugs I wrote against Apple Mail will ever get fixed and I don't know if I really care. The are some some more fundamental problems with Internet e-mail than just MIME formats. It may not make sense for Apple to do anything at all. Regardless, Apple is the innocent party here.

Whatever. Claiming to be good, non-hegemony doesn't solve the issue if 95% of the world does pick a bad implementation. VHS won over Beta.

The issue is this -- I can't count on my Mail messages looking professional to the vast ⚠ majority of readers. As someone who deals with design, I look bad.

I'll give up on Mail until the program can assure me it can deliver a message to the rest of the world that matches what I drafted (without worrying about re-formatting text and hoping the message goes through OK.)

LOswego wrote:
Whatever. Claiming to be good, non-hegemony doesn't solve the issue if 95% of the world does pick a bad implementation. VHS won over Beta.

You are missing the point entirely. I never said HTML was bad, just that it wasn't standard but has become so because Microsoft unilaterally decided to make it so. HTML is a fundamentally better markup language than MIME richtext.

The issue is this -- I can't count on my Mail messages looking professional to the vast ⚠ majority of readers.

In no way does HTML guarantee that your recipient will see the message the way you composed it. Even if you tossed your Mac out the window and used only Outlook, you still would not have that guarantee.

As someone who deals with design, I look bad.

If you deal with design, then maybe you should recognize that e-mail (HTML or not) is simply a very poor medium for transmitting design. Relying on e-mail in any way for design makes you look bad.

In case you hadn't noticed, there has been a perfectly good formatted e-mail standard for 15 years. Microsoft never supported it and no one cared. Apple Mail has had poor support for Microsoft's HTML e-mail standard for 3 years, and no one cared. There is a reason for that. People understand the limits of e-mail and don't rely upon it for design. You should do likewise.

This is a ridiculous work around but it works. Set up Mail to compose messages in plain text. Create the message, select all, choose your font - say Arial 12 pt, Mail will ask you if you want to convert your message to rich text (HTML), say yes and send.

Outlook users who have left there font settings alone - which is what 99% of them do, will see your message as you intended (ie. Arial 12 pt).

Personally I now stick with plain text because (a) most people are blind to typefaces, (b) email is a throw away medium (c) plain text is reliable and clutter free.

All the best.

Create the message, select all, choose your font - say Arial 12 pt, Mail will ask you if you want to convert your message to rich text (HTML), say yes and send.

I think this will only work if you do not have Arial selected in Mail preferences.

I totally understand your issue and it annoys me too, so today I set out to find a way to fix it that would work for me.

I found the best way is to set up an email signature (Preferences > Signatures). Tick 'Always match my default message font'. Make sure your default message font is set to the size and font you want your email to be in (Preferences > Fonts & Colours).

When you create a new email, the email signature will appear below the message in the correct font and size. Just place your cursor directly in front of the first letter of this, and start typing your message. The message you type adopts the size and font of the signature.

If you don't want a signature in your email message, just set up a dummy one, then after typing your message, delete it.

Easy!

Hope it works for others.

ETA: If you change your default message font AFTER you set up the signature, you need to go back into the Signatures setup and untick then re-tick the 'Always match my default message font' option to update the signature to your latest font.

Oh and upon further testing, this technique only appears to work on replies and forwards. Not for new messages.

Message was edited by: Charlotte Reeves

Apple Mail should use CSS for HTML messages instead of deprecated HTML tags - Enhancement

Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended based on the following information:

Mail uses font tags instead of CSS for compatibility. There are still quite a few email clients that don't handle CSS properly.

I'm glad you posted this response. I was going to post about this myself.

Much of my work involves sending HTML email newsletters. Through this work I've come to the same conclusion: If you want HTML email to look reasonably consistent in most currently-used email programs and webmail services, you need to use some deprecated tags, including font tags.

Even more significant, CSS is a problem in email because +some webmail services completely strip out most or all CSS+. If you want consistent results you can't use internal or external stylesheets at all, because webmail (and maybe even some email programs) only displays what is between the body tags. But even inline CSS is stripped out by some webmail services, so inline styles also must be used judiciously, knowing some people won't see that styling at all.

For this reason, font tags become necessary and you can't use CSS at all for layout if you don't want the layout to fall apart completely in webmail.

Apple Mail does not specify font style when sending HTML messages - UI/Usability

This is behaving correctly. Mail tries not to specify any font information in the message that the sender didn't explicitly set,

I guess they did not get the point that even when the sender explicitly sets the font, but it just happens to be the same font set in Preferences, no font code is put in the outgoing ("the bug").

Thanks much for the interesting feedback!

Tom Gewecke wrote:
I guess they did not get the point that even when the sender explicitly sets the font, but it just happens to be the same font set in Preferences, no font code is put in the outgoing ("the bug").

Maybe it was my fault and I did not explain it clearly. I wrote a new one with the title "Apple Mail cannot send rich text using the default Apple Mail font". I agree with their rationale for closing the first bug, but I still think this is an issue.

Thanks for that information. I actually do send out some e-mails using CSS. Perhaps I shouldn't. I do include a plain-text alternative, but that won't help if the e-mail client still displays the "rich text", but hacked-up, body.

Maybe I should take a lesson from the spammers and send it in binary. Their messages always seem to get through with no problem 🙂

etresoft wrote:
Thanks for that information. I actually do send out some e-mails using CSS. Perhaps I shouldn't.

It probably depends largely on your audience. If you're sending to a smaller number of people who you know are using modern email programs (and not webmail) then you're probably fine. If otherwise, maybe not...

Maybe I should take a lesson from the spammers and send it in binary. Their messages always seem to get through with no problem 🙂

LOL! Good thought. 😉

This works for me Charlotte - I have tested it sending to Outlook and Outlook Express - which is what 95% of my correspondents use. This has foxed me for a year since I came back to Mac - it's the picking up of the signature font formatting that makes the difference. It also works on new messages.

But isn't it a bit strange that if you put the cursor on the top line of a new message or reply (where the signature font formatting is not in place), that the message you send reverts to Times New Roman again? To the lay user this definitely seems like a bug, because you can get the desired result by a work around such as yours (and it appears on the recipient's PC just as expected), but if you make a mistake in your formatting it comes out as a real mess.

I will probably stick with plain text messages though, because I have got used to it now - and at the end of the day, it's only email...

It doesn't "revert to Times New Roman." It reverts to no font tags. Since it does not contain font information, Outlook displays it in its default font of Times New Roman, which you cannot change. Someone please send a bug report to Microsoft.

Speaking as a 'user' and not a computer programmer, it may not revert to Times New Roman as such, but Mail.app does not make it easy to maintain the formatting at the start of a new message created in the way described above. If it did it would clear up this matter for 99% of the Mac users that come to this forum with this issue.

I don't agree that Outlook users change their viewing fonts. In my experience, going back ten years or more, most stay with the default settings of 10 pt Arial - being more concerned about content than design. The frustrating thing is that Mail.app is clearly quite capable of being engineered to sort this matter, but it is as if Apple thinks it's Microsoft's problem and that it is they who should sort Outlook out. Whereas, MS aren't at all bothered, because the vast majority of people in the world use a PC and so it does not affect them. Unfortunately, it is us Mac users, who are corresponding every day with PC users, who have to compromise their email formatting to avoid looking like amateurs... which is why I have reluctantly resorted to plain text for all my email.

In my experience, going back ten years or more, most stay with the default settings of 10 pt Arial -

Let's be clear about this. Mail.app does not send Times New Roman, it just sends nothing. So when TNR appears at the other end in Outlook, it is because that is what Outlook is using as its default. If what you say is true, that on most machines the default is set to Arial, then the "TNR Problem" should not exist for them. But apparently it does exist for many people or we would not have these threads.

It's true, of course, that Mail could be improved to ensure that Arial or whatever can always be sent, with minimal extra effort, when that is what the author intends.