Smiley faces/emoticons in mail?

Leeta, you can paste smileys into Mail as pictures if you have them stored somewhere. They can be dragged into the position you want if they drop in the wrong place. Depending on the recipients choice of preferences they may or may not download into your set positions. If this positioning is important create a separate file, eg in Word, and insert the file into your email.

Neville

There's no way to do this solely within Mail without cutting and pasting, though, is there? That would be a nice feature.

Do a Google search with the words: emoticon font

You will find free fonts which can be downloaded and installed using Font Book. Just select the font, size and color you want.

I don't know whether all will instal on a Mac but most seem to be TT fonts so should be OK.

Neville

Your solution requires the recipient to have the same emoticon font installed.

True!

So perhaps the next best option is to collect the free emoticons from some source and import them into iPhoto as individual files, create an album called 'Emoticons', for example, then use Mail's Photo browser button to select those you want when you are typing your email. I don't know whether the problem of attachments being placed at the end, depending on the recipient's settings can be overcome easily.

An alternative roundabout method using emoticon fonts would be to type the message in say Word and insert this file as an attachment to the email. Saving as pdf should overcome the font problem.

Neville

I think that it coud be really easy for Apple to add this functionality in Apple Mail, and I hope that it will be one of the new feature for the next release, instead of other *useless themes for messages*....

iChat emoticons are good and almost enough... I suppose that it's not so difficult for Apple Engeneers to take those emoticons and put them also into Mail....

My very old Eudora application simply translates : ) (without the space) in the proper image: 🙂 without any need for pasting images in the message. This feature is so widely spread, even standard in these Apple forums, and I am astonished it is still missing in mail.app... Make it an option so people can turn it off.

Well, since email is a completely text-based system with hacks to display images, which must be enabled on the receiving client to view, and the location might not appear where you want depending on the receiving client's user settings, I'm not sure why you'd want Mail to do that.

Mail could translate what it receives, though.