Best practices for formatting Mac Mail messages that will be sent to people using Outlook?

For the fourth or fifth time, the sender can not control the display formatting in the recipient's email client. If the sender wants minimum affect to his formatting he should send his email in plain text format. He has no clue who or how many of his recipients are setting their email client to meet their needs or what those needs are.

DanaKirsch wrote: Here's another example. When I reply to a message, in Mac Mail it shows up in a nice purple font, and is clearly highlighted with a pipe in front of it. This makes it easy to reply "inline". However, readers viewing this message in Outlook get lousy formatting cues so they can't figure out where the reply is.

Do you have a screen shot of that Outlook experience? It might help for trying to figure out whether Mail has any way to avoid it...

Tom Gewecke wrote:

BobTheFisherman wrote:

The format of email is under the control of the recipient. ... I and many others will not allow your formatting to be displayed in our email client, Outlook or any other.

I'm not familiar with any way to have Apple Mail display only plain text out of the box, you normally always see the html rich text formatting decided by the sender. Do you have some kind of add on for that?

On the other hand, Apple Mail by defaut always sends plain text.

This is one reason many do not use the feature-deficient Mail client.

BobTheFisherman wrote:

Here is how Outlook controls received email format.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/read-email-messages-in-plain-text-16dfe54a-fadc-4261-b2ce-19ad072ed7e3

Yes, you have certainly made your point. I am sure some people do use that setting, but a very large number also do not. DanaKirsch is asking how, for those that do not, a Mail using sender can best avoid mess-up formatting at the other end.

They don't look the same in my email client. I won't allow formatted marketing emails to look anything like they formatted. I, and many others only allow plain text in received email.

The fomat of received emails is under the control of recipients. You can't force a recipient to see your formatting. If formatting is important to you then create a PDF document and attach that to your email.

I'll try again. The format of email is under the control of the recipient. This does not only apply to Outlook users. You can send all the purple text you want to me and thousands of others and we will not see your purple text. Email is not a word processing app it does not contain the formatting functionality of word processors. Email is insecure and can contain web bugs (beacons) and other intrusive capability. This is why I and many others will not allow your formatting to be displayed in our email client, Outlook or any other.

BobTheFisherman wrote:

The format of email is under the control of the recipient. ... I and many others will not allow your formatting to be displayed in our email client, Outlook or any other.

I'm not familiar with any way to have Apple Mail display only plain text out of the box, you normally always see the html rich text formatting decided by the sender. Do you have some kind of add on for that?

On the other hand, Apple Mail by defaut always sends plain text.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

DanaKirsch wrote: Here's another example. When I reply to a message, in Mac Mail it shows up in a nice purple font, and is clearly highlighted with a pipe in front of it. This makes it easy to reply "inline". However, readers viewing this message in Outlook get lousy formatting cues so they can't figure out where the reply is.

Do you have a screen shot of that Outlook experience? It might help for trying to figure out whether Mail has any way to avoid it...

It is up to the recipient. The sender can not "avoid" the recipient's settings. If you as a sender could bypass my settings I would block all email coming from you.

Here is how Outlook controls received email format.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/read-email-messages-in-plain-text-16dfe54a-fadc-4261-b2ce-19ad072ed7e3

BobTheFisherman wrote:

He has no clue who or how many of his recipients are setting their email client to meet their needs or what those needs are.

In the real world, vast numbers of users exchange large volumes of email in environments where they know their audience is using outlook not set to display only plain text, and if these users would use outlook themselves they could normally be sure their audience would see their formatted email as they intended. But it happens they hate outlook and want to use Mail, so things are harder....

For best results it may well be better to use Outlook yourself. Mail lacks some key features, like being able to set a default font for outgoing messages.