Q: highlighting words in Mail

Sort of. You would have to create the text in TextEdit for example, highlight the words, then copy and paste the text into Mail.

It is a tad clunky. I should have added, you hightlight the words in TextEdit by choosing a text background color.

The custom paragraph styles that you create in TextEdit are also available to you in Apple Mail. Thus, you can create a yellow highlight paragraph style in TextEdit, and with a right-click on selected text in the Mail compose window, you can choose Fonts : Styles : and then from a slide-in panel, choose the yellow highlight, and apply it to your selected Mail text. Assumption: You are using Rich Text Mail, and not plain text.

Here are the steps to set up a custom paragraph style in TextEdit.

1. Enter a word, select it, and from the button adjacent to font color, select your highlight color. You now have yellow (my choice) highlighted text.
2. At the far left of the TextEdit toolbar is the paragraph style button. At the bottom of its menu is Show Styles… — click that.
3. A panel slides down showing the yellow highlighted text. Click the Add to Favorites button. Another panel slides down and only enter the name of the paragraph style (e.g. Highlight - Yellow, Highlight, etc.). Leave the accompanying boxes unchecked, and click Add.
4. At this point, your Highlight paragraph style is ready to apply back in the Mail compose window.

First I wanted to say I forgot to include the info you provided so thanks for that. I am curious about this method. Have you ever known an email sent with highlighted text to arrive still highlighted? I've only tried it from one of my email accounts to a different account and it wasn't highlighted when it arrived.

Not really much point to creating a highlight style if it doesn't work for the recipient.

Open the mail app & select the text you want to high light then > go to format on top menu bar  > show colours > then select the desired colour .

appreciate wrote:

 

Open the mail app & select the text you want to high light then > go to format on top menu bar  > show colours > then select the desired colour .

The question wasn't about how to change the text color. It was about how to highlight the text.

Glad you pointed that highlight survivability issue. The solution that I provided gets the text highlighted, but it is useless, as the highlighting is lost in transit.

On the otherhand, an html email that uses <span style="background-color:yellow;">some highlighted text</span> to apply text highlight will survive the email journey, providing the mail user agent of the recipient is configured to receive rich text or html mail. One can copy the highlighted HTML from Safari and paste into the Mail body to test this. It works. Not universally user-friendly though.

There is no easy highlighting; and probably it will not be displayed at the receiver's side at all.

BUT: You can easily type the word with characters in another color:

VikingOSX wrote:

 

One can copy the highlighted HTML from Safari and paste into the Mail body to test this. It works. Not universally user-friendly though.

Not exactly friendly, no.

FWIW, that's the same method we've been talking about