Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, Mail.app stubbornly refuses to allow me to bold or italicize my fonts. I can underline, but I can't do any other text formatting options.
Very puzzling. Can anyone shed any light on this problem, or if they've had it too?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1), 2.3 Ghz Core i5, 8GB RAM
You can only bold or italicize if you're using rich text. Make sure you're sending messages in rich (as opposed to plain) text.
Here's an appropriate section from Mail's Help addressing this:
Use plain or rich text in messages
You can use plain text or rich text (HTML) formatting when you write messages. If you receive a message that’s hard to read, you can read it as plain text.
Set the format for all messages: Choose Mail > Preferences, click Composing, and then choose the format you want to use most often in your messages.
Change the format for your current message: Choose Format > Make Rich Text or Format > Make Plain Text before sending the message.
Set the format for replies: Select the “Use the same message format as the original message” checkbox in the Responding section.
Well, that's the thing. My messages ARE in rich text. Hence my confusion.
I too have the same problem, I cannot bold or italic despite having reich text enabled. Help please!
Mail > Preferences > Composing
Mail menu bar:
Message > Text Encoding > Automatic
Format > Make Rich Text
Do you have the format bar selector added to your compose (new message) panel?
If not, right-button click below the New Message header and choose Customize Toolbar..., then drag that icon to the toolbar. Selecting the icon will allow the following to appear:
And now, you should have Rich Text styling available to you in Mail 6.
All IS set just as you indicate. And Bold and Italic are still greyed out and unusable.
I have the same exact problem and I have tried all the solutions here but nothing works. I cannot bold or italicize text using keyboard shortcuts (cmd+B and cmd+I) no matter how many times I press them (the same shortcuts work everywhere else across the system, i.e. in Pages, Word, TextEdit, etc.). The only way for me to add formating to my text is by using the "format bar" but even this does not work the way it should. If I select text and press on Bold or Italics, it doesn't do anything the first time, only when I press it again for a second time it works. It's the most weird and annoying thing. Please help!!
Same exact problem here, and running Mountain Lion. I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing this. Guess I will have to use other mail app until it gets solved... :/
Happy news, I found the solution. At least for me, this problem was fixed by clearing the font cache. See this link:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2229970?start=0&tstart=0
Alas, this didn't work for me. I followed the terminal instructions, rebooted, tested, then even ran FontNuke. Still no resolution.
I know this is 3 years later but in case anyone is having this issue. I had to make sure that the bold and italic faces of the font I was trying to use were activated in my font manager.
Why can't I format text in Mountain Lion's Mail.app?
