Oldie but a goodie: Why does apple mail.app, still, not send an outgoing default font the way every single other email application does?

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Oldie but a goodie: Why does apple mail.app, still, not send an outgoing default font the way every single other email application does?

Why does apple mail.app not send an outgoing default font the way every single other email application does? Change your default message font in Apple's mail.app. Notice all your "sent messages" fonts have changed. How would it be possible to change the font on a message that is already sent? The simple answer is the default font only changes the way the font looks to you not the way the message will actually look to the recipients. If you look at the HTML code it is clear no font information is sent, unless you change it for each email. (Size and font type.) Apple doesn't want you to show any personality in your email. This is the answer I have been given by many Apple enthusiasts.

In the signature setup, there is a check box that says always match default font. What this actually does is remove all font information from the signature. It doesn't match anything. Send mail to yourself with this checked and then unchecked. Include the signature on both emails. Then after, change your default font and look at the two messages in your sent folder. When you change the default font the email that did not have the box checked will show the same font regardless of what the current default font is.

I still call this a bug since they've added a Check box that does not do what it says. It should say: "ignore font settings in signature."

This bug has been around since the very, very beginning of Apple's Mac OS X's Mail Program, at least since "Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah" in 2001.

Here are the two basic work arounds:

Easiest work around: use any other mail program. I use Postbox.app. There are many different email client apps out there.
Sticking with Apple's "Mail.app"? Add a signature, DO NOT CHECK OFF "ALWAYS MATCH MY DEFAULT MESSAGE FONT"! Add to the signature a line of dashes or underline characters at the top of the signature, put several empty lines then put your signature, like this:

------------------------

{PUT YOUR MESSAGE HERE}

-John

John Smith

123 Jonesboro ST

Jonesboro, KY 99999-9999

noone@nowhere.com

+1-999-999-9999

When composing, put your message in between the beginning and end of your signature. Then your font will survive Apples crappy "Mail.app". It is only crappy because for 20 years they haven't added the ability to have a default font for outgoing messages.

EDIT: (What I say here is as current as the initial release of "macOS Catalina 10.15", October, 2019.) :-)

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to respond. I know at least one major Apple supporter, a regular at the "WWDC", that is annoyed by my ever-present "Chalkboard 14 font". I do not know if he feels he needs to "'toe' the party Line"(I thought it was "tow" also, look it up.), he really thinks all email personalization should be banned or maybe, he might be just making fun of me...

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Oct 21, 2019 12:48 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,836 points

Oct 22, 2019 10:02 AM in response to markfromlandolakes

You've made a good summary of the situation regarding this issue, which comes up fairly frequently.

But the forum you have posted in is normally a place to talk about things like Terminal, Automator, and Applescript. I suggest you repost your message as a "User Tip" in the MacOS Catalina forum. That's where such info about the Mail app would usually go. Also perhaps change the title to something like "How to have a default outgoing font in Mail.app".

I think the most common alternative app which has the desired feature is Outlook.

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Oct 22, 2019 10:18 AM in response to markfromlandolakes

Maybe I'm missing something here:

default font only changes the way the font looks to you not the way the message will actually look to the recipients

Thats always been the case - and always will be since you have zero knowledge or control over the mail client the recipient is going to use to view the message. Your default font might be Comic Sans, someone else might use Helvetica, and someone else uses Times. Heck, someone else might use mutt, which doesn't even know what a font is!

What I think you're commenting on is largely semantics over the wording of the checkbox (i.e. whether it includes font hints in the signature), but there has never been any expectation of consistent viewing of email content, nor in HTML. If you want that, use PDF *

* yes, I know PDF isn't always consistent, too, but at least it's designed for that more than email is.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,836 points

Oct 22, 2019 11:33 AM in response to Camelot

Camelot wrote: Thats always been the case - and always will be since you have zero knowledge or control over the mail client the recipient is going to use to view the message.

I think that in practice vast numbers of people use systems where they do have control over the default font encoded in their outgoing messages and the recipients client (for better or for worse) does honor those codes and display the font chosen by the sender if it is installed. MS Office works this way, via Outlook. Some organizations have mandatory policies about fonts to be used.

Anyone using Mail instead of Outlook who needs to control the outgoing font has to set it for each outgoing individually (or use a workaround). That despite the fact that Mail Preferences > Composing claims that you can set the Format to Rich Text (=html). This setting is bogus, however, because the outgoing will not be in Rich Text by default, it will be in Plain Text, with no html.

Some see it as a virtue that Mail by default does not force the Mac sender's font choice on recipients. On the other hand, Mail does not provide any way for users to override the font chosen by senders of html emails it receives. Mail > Preferences > Fonts > Message Font only works on plain text incomings.

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Answer 4

Oct 22, 2019 2:20 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

(This was actually in response to Camelot, I hit the wrong Reply Button)

In Apple's Mail.app email client, for an incoming email, it will display the HTML in the email to the best of its ability. If the font exists on the Mac it will be displayed according to the way the HTML Code is. No setting in the "Fonts & Colors" Preferences will change the email, if font information is included in the HTML. It is only the default message font, color and size, i.e. it doesn't force a change in the incoming email. If only Font type is in the HTML then, the default size and color will apply. If every bit of text in the incoming email has the type, size and color defined specifically, none of the defaults in the "Fonts & Colors" Preference pane will apply.

My friend uses Apple's Mail.app, almost every personal email he receives is from someone using Apples's Mail.app. My emails are the only ones he receives that don't appear in the default font he has set in the "Fonts & Colors" Preference pane. He makes fun of my emails for this reason.

As far as I know, every single email client in general use today uses HTML. You could make an email client app that doesn't use any HTML, I believe it would still comply with RFC 5322. I bet you could find a couple of 90 year olds from the golden age of "ARPANET" that might want to use it. The original "ARPANET" mail format included no HTML at all... HTML hadn't been invented. Each computer only had one font for display and one font on the printer. Ahhhh, those were the days...

In my non-Mail.app email, my chosen default font appears like this, in the HTML code generated by the mail client:

style="font-family: Chalkboard; font-size: 14px;"

Most of the people I send emails to have Macs, since I am using a standard font that is on all Macs, my chosen font will be the font displayed in Mail.app the exact way I intended....

A safer choice would be:

style="font-family: Comic Sans MS; font-size: 14px;"

This is a safer choice because this font is on more platforms.

In my email client, I can edit the HTML for my Signature. Therefore I can add a fall back Font for my signature. iPhones do not have Chalkboard or Comic sans, if I want to fall back to "Arial" I can do this, (otherwise the iPhone displays "Times"):

style="font-family: Comic Sans MS, Arial; font-size: 14px;"

With the Mail.app Client it isn't clear what font information is being sent. By default, no font information is encoded in the HTML generated by Mail.app. Even the way a signature is displayed is inconsistent, sometimes a signature seems to have your chosen font and it does not.

PDFs are another story. A PDF can look the same but be encoded many different ways.

1. A searchable image, a searchable image has a large file size and the characters are not scalable,

2. Only containing font types, i.e. no contained vector graphics, then, you are a victim of what fonts the recipient has.

3. Containing the Fonts themselves, i.e. each individual fonts vector graphics are included, if this is being sent to a commercial printing company and they may not have a license to reproduce those fonts. (The file contains the font name and then the vector graphics that define that named font.)

4. The best way to send to a commercial printing company is to transform all of the characters into vector graphics, this absolutely preserves the font, and makes the image infinitely scalable. Essentially you have a Vector graphics Image. This creates a small file as well as avoids all other issues. If you selected a portion of text in the PDF and copied and pasted, no font information would exist to be copied and pasted, only the actual text,(if the actual text still existed in the PDF). (This can be done several different ways in Adobe InDesign, the tool is called "create outlines")

Most of the time, for most users, when creating a PDF, the user doesn't have to worry about what is going on in the background.

This is a much deeper explanation of the way these things work and not work as the case may be. 99% of users won't care a bit about any of this.

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Answer 5

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Oct 22, 2019 2:50 PM in response to markfromlandolakes

I generally agree with what you say, Mark. It only goes to add to the fact that it's a mess - there is no true standard here.

Personally, I see this as a parallel to Outlook's read-receipts, which are rarely honored outside of Windows Server domains. Or maybe message recall, which has a similarly poor adoption rate outside of Windows (my mailbox includes 22 'recall' messages that I just smile at :) )

Oh, and there are a fair number of mail clients out there that don't honor HTML. Maybe they're not mainstream, and maybe it's only crusty die-hards or masochists who use them, but they do exist. In any case, there has to be some demand otherwise why is there often a 'plain-text' version of your message included in outgoing 'HTML'-based email.

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Answer 6

Oct 22, 2019 2:55 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I looked at all the options for posting, Since this applies to all versions of macOS X I figured this was the best option. Most people don't care about this anyway or Apple would have fixed it 15 years ago.... I recently had to use the "Mail.app" for something. It made me wonder if Apple has fixed this issue yet.

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Answer 7

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,179 points

Oct 31, 2019 2:57 PM in response to markfromlandolakes

That's lovely, but for example I read many of my email messages in a text-only mail application, so everything comes out in the X11 "fixed" font.

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Oldie but a goodie: Why does apple mail.app, still, not send an outgoing default font the way every single other email application does?

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