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Apple Mail, underlines and strikethrough's do not work

Occasionally when I write an e-mail I will use underlines and strikethrough's using the formatting tools provided in Apple Mail.


These show up perfectly when I'm composing my e-mail, however they never show up for the recipient. I have even sent myself an e-mail, the underlines and strikethrough's are not there.


How can I fix this?

Posted on Jun 27, 2011 9:52 PM

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Posted on Jun 28, 2011 3:03 AM

Have you made sure that in the New Message pane you set a font and size different from what is already set in Mail > Preferences? I think that is required for the outgoing to actually include the rich text codes you want to send.

7 replies

Oct 4, 2013 10:14 PM in response to Ziatron

Incredibly, Mail.app as of OS X 10.8.5 still ignores certain styles applied to emails being composed when *sending* them - while composing, everything *appears* fine.

In other words: your carefully applied styles during message composition may get quietly discarded when your message is sent.

To see what actually got sent, check the Sent folder (which, obviously, is too late…).


This is clearly a bug and I will file a report with Apple.


It seems that only the application of *certain* styles cause Mail.app to retain *all* styles in the message being composed.


For instance: As long as the message contains at least 1 *bold or italic* character, all styles are retained. Also, changing the size of any characters causes all styles to be retained.


By contrast, having only any combination of underlined and strike-through text without any other styles present will cause neither style to be applied.


In other words: there are certain *trigger* styles that must be used in order to retain *any* - and thereby all - styles.


Workaround: Create a signature that contains at least 1 bold or italic character. Note that, unfortunately, Mail.app (as of OS X 10.8.5) does NOT accept a signature composed of spaces only (it either discards them quietly or quietly reverts to the previous content), so your signature must contain at least 1 non-space character; you can, however, apply boldface to a trailing space (in other words: the non-space character(s) need not be bolded themselves).

Oct 19, 2013 12:10 PM in response to mklement0

Alternatively, you could probably use a period or even some random character like ◧ and change the font color to white.


I say "probably" because I couldn't get it to apply any signatures, even ones that say "name@email.com" or "something something sent from my Mac Mini".


But changing the font to size 13 on-the-fly works well enough for me, and doesn't look alltogether different.

Apple Mail, underlines and strikethrough's do not work

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