How to change background color in mail messages?

It is located in the Format/Fonts menu when you are composing an email. Or, remember the Command-T shortcut to get there fast.

You have to know where to look. It is located in the Format/Fonts menu when you are composing an email. Or, remember the Command-T shortcut to get there fast.

It's still available in Lion's version of Mail.

Open a New Message window in Mail. Then select Show Fonts from the Format menu.

In the Fonts screen, click the button for Document Color; a clor selection window will open. In that, choose the color you want for background.

Note - if you do this before entering any text in the New Message, you can save it as a Stationery item, which means you can select it from the Stationery menu in the future, saving many steps.

Not for me, it doesn't. I choose a document color (black) and nothing changes. Changing text color does work. Running Lion 10.7.5, Mail 5.3.

Hi Don ::

Thanks for pointing out this UI feature. Was able to do exactly what I needed.

Marc

grtgrfx wrote:

Not for me, it doesn't. I choose a document color (black) and nothing changes. Changing text color does work. Running Lion 10.7.5, Mail 5.3.

Same here. OS X 10.9.2, Mail 7.2.

In 7.3, I just selected all of the open message, opened type window and colour windows, then clicked on background colour doo-hickey in type window.

Started selecting various colours in colour window until I found the one I wanted. Seems to have worked. Or at least it's a workaround, for now.