How do I ensure Mail defines my font explicitly on outgoing messages?

thats an ever lasting issue of Apple

google universalmailer - this solves the email on received side and it looks OK.

BUT... still if the mail is fwd'ed then it'll look partially in Arial and rest e.g. Signature will look as you set.

How an email is formatted and displayed in in the recipient's email client is up to the recipient not the sender.

schmitgreg wrote:

When I send email from Mail, it doesn't attach any text formatting to the body, so when other clients receive it they default to Times New Roman; this appears extremely unprofessional. If I send from Outlook, heck even Yahoo webmail, the font is defined explicitly so your email looks how you intend it to look; with Mail this is not the case.

Please let me know how to tell my Mail client to attach font definitions explicitly (not by using the signature trick where you add a line to your signature or select your text and select another font and then select back to the original font; these are silly, stupid, hacky workarounds).

Regards,

-GNS

I am sorry, but you are wrong. Just change your settings to send rich text e-mail instead of plain text and your recipients will receive it the way you intended (even with colors, miriads of different fonts and styles - I wonder if it would look professional that way :-))

Email has always been this way. Actually, it was straight, unformatted text only at first. HTML tags came later.

When using HTML (formatted email), you are very limited to the fonts you can use. They must exist and be enabled on both ends. Fonts do not go with the email. Only HTML tags that state what font was used. If they don't have a font you used installed and enabled on their end, it will be substituted with whatever their email is set to use for substitution. Or, they may have their email client set to always display incoming emails as unformatted text only.

You can't fully control what the recipient sees.

My issue is that (as I mentioned to Bob) if I use Mail and another person uses Outlook and we both send an email to the same person using Outlook and they appear different, it is because of the formatting of the email at the client-side.

Yes, that's been mentioned here a lot regarding Mail. I won't use it. That partly because to make sure I can open client documents correctly, I always have the latest version of Office for Mac installed. And as long as I'm plunking down the money for that, I may as well get the version with Outlook included (Entourage in Office 2008 and older).

Mail doesn't use HTML, but rather the Rich Text format. Most other email clients don't really know how to parse that correctly as they expect formatted emails to be HTML. No idea why Apple choose Rich Text formatting rather than HTML.