Mail Formatting Problems, why are received emails looking so different ?

Barney-15E wrote:

If you leave the default font without changing it, the message is interpreted as plain text by outlook.

Actually the problem is that Mail sends the message as plain text. All receiving email apps will use the local defaut font to display it.

John Lockwood wrote:

plain text aka. ASCII

That usage has been obsolete for a while. These days "plain text" refers to the lack of formatting info regardless of character set. ASCII refers to a 7 bit character set for English which can be either "plain" or "rich" in terms of formatting

You cannot alter the way your recipient's email client decides to format your email message.

If they are using Outlook, then it is known to completely hack the emails as it was designed to handle only Exchange email. Real email was an afterthought/hack onto the original code.

There are some workarounds, if that is the case.

Make sure you have Windows Friendly and Attachments at end of Message set in the Edit>Attachments menu.

When you compose an email, change the Font when you begin composing. If you leave the default font without changing it, the message is interpreted as plain text by outlook. It then uses its default display font of Times New Roman.

If you really need a message displayed exactly as you intend, create a PDF and send that.

Some people seem to think that email should behave like a Desktop Publishing application and provide full-blown and consistent fully formatted documents/emails.

Unfortunately email dates back to the very dawn of the Internet and was originally only able to support ASCII characters with no formatting at all. Email programs have been enhanced over time with now three main types of email content, plain text aka. ASCII, RTF aka. Rich Text Format, and HTML i.e. equivalent to a web-browser. However just like different word-processors can show slightly different results for the same RTF document, and just like different web-browsers can show slightly or even significantly different results for the same web-page different email clients can show different results. Even different versions of Outlook all running in Windows can produce different results.

You also have to remember that different computers - even when running the same operating system and email client may have totally different sets of fonts installed and the difference in fonts can also distort appearances.

As you have no control over what happens at the other end when an email is sent and no control over what email software they use there is nothing that can be really done about this. This used to drive me mad with despair as I could not get managers to understand the limitations involved.

Even where there are rules and standards that should help out the reality is that many, many email clients implement the rules differently or make outright errors in doing so. Apple have been particularly bad at this and still are.