Editing outgoing emails

Question

Editing outgoing emails

I have a sx-month old MacBook Air running osx 10.8.1.

I use Apple Mail.

Out of the blue, I can no longer hightlight text in an outgoing email which I am composing and bold it, underline it, or italicize it.

This happened from one day to the next. I checked all my preferences and can't see any which would cause this.

Under Composing in Mail's preferences, I have chosen Plain Text. In the past, when I highlighted a word and bolded it, I would get an alert with something like - Do you want to change this message to Rich Text - and I would choose yes and then I could bold or italicize text in the message.

Now when I highlight text and try to bold it, I don't get that alert and I am unable to change the text in any way..

Would greatly any solutions anyone might suggest.

Thanks.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 26, 2012 7:57 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 26, 2012 3:40 PM in response to Community User

Plain Text means just that — no styling of any kind. If you want styled text, change the setting from Plain Text to Rich Text.

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Answer 2

May 20, 2015 2:00 PM in response to Jeffrey Jones2

Thanks, Jeffrey.

I know I can change the preferenes to Rich Text, but previously I was able to do this on the fly.

I.e., with the preferences set to Plain Text, if I began an emeil and tried to bold/italicize/etc. text in that email, I would get an alert to the effect: do you want to change this email to Rich Text. I would choose OK, and then could make changes to that email, but my prefereces were not changed to Rich Text.

I do not normally have them set to Rich Text because there is a List to whih I subsribe that will accept emails only in Plain Text.

I was trying to dope out why from one day to the next I could no longer do this.

P.s. Sorry for taking so long to reply, but even though I have my prefereces set to notify me when aomeone responds to my post, I was never notified.

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Answer 3

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Sep 2, 2012 8:32 AM in response to Community User

BikerBob38 wrote:

Thanks, Jeffrey.

I know I can change the preferenes to Rich Text, but previously I was able to do this on the fly.

And now you can't, select RTF as needed.

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Answer 4

Sep 2, 2012 8:45 AM in response to Community User

It's not a feature I ever used much, so I hadn't paid attention. So… interestingly, I just tried it, and it still works for me.

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Answer 5

May 20, 2015 2:00 PM in response to Jeffrey Jones2

Jeffrey,

Just to be clear: are you confirming that with Mail > Composing settings set to Simple Text, that you can highlight text in a draft email and change it on the fly to bold, italics, etc. I swear I can remember doing that. BTW I am using the latest version of Mail in the latest version of Mt. Lion.

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Answer 6

Sep 7, 2012 9:35 PM in response to Community User

Yes, that is what I am getting: composing a plain text message; try to italicize a word; a drop-down dialog offers to convert to rich text. Exactly as you say it used to work for you. OS X 10.8.1, Mail 6.0.

I was going to ask what font you are using, but it appears that that doesn't make any difference for me either.

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