Can someone please tell me if there is an easy way to highlight text in Mail, Version 9.3 (3124). Isn't there an icon you can click on?
I have done it the long way by adding it to Font > Styles > Favourite Styles but this long way seems a bit archaic for Apple.
Also, I have not figured out how to remove a highlight or to stop highlighting for further text when typing an email.
MacBook Pro with Retina display
You can enter Time Machine while in the Mail interface to recover or you can restore from Time Machine via the User's Library.
You can just restore the account. In V3 look for the folder that has [Gmail].mbox
AFAIK this is not an option in Mail. You can highlight in a PDF in Preview. I suspect this is to keep the integrity of editing a mail message.
Mail has an option to export messages as PDF. Under File in the Menu bar select Export as PDF...
You can also check out this free app, Skim. Skim is a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X. Skim is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF.
There is a video here showing how to use.
I found out you can highlight in Mail although I find it ridiculous that we have to go through all of this rather than just a one click step like I have done for many, many years with MS Office & Outlook.
This did work for me: http://www.mihalick.us/how-to-highlight-text-in-yellow-using-apple-mail/
It will continue to highlight though, so you have to highlight the text that has the highlight > right click, > Default > Apply.
The other way of highlighting and removing it is to copy something that is highlighted from the web or something that you have saved to use as a template, then paste it to your email/doc and just change the text. To undo it, do the same: highlight text that has no highlight and copy & paste it then just change the text.
It would be nice if Apple had a one click highlighter though rather than going through all of this.
I just tested it and the recipient saw all of the different colours that I highlighted and unhighlighted in the email. So it does work. Maybe the last time you tried it it did not, so please test it now and see what happens.
It is such a simple solution which works or me.
I tested it on my Mac, iPhone, iPad and on a Windows PC using Gmail and Yahoo online, but have not tested it on MS Outlook yet. I no longer use Outlook, so I will send something to a friend who does and get back to you.
No rush. I don't normally use email clients anyway. Just for testing. Right now I'm trying to figure out why when I send a rich text email, it looks like plain text in the sent box. Which would explain why the highlighting doesn't work.
I can verify that sending highlight text from Mail to Outlook for Mac 2011 & 2016 does work. Replying to that message from Outlook that included the original highlighted text does include the highlighting. In Outlook there is no option to include style, however, you can in Outlook use the highlighted text received to modify the highlighted text to reply.
The link to download the following is now broken, but you should be able to use this to add to styles.
MEM_Styles_v1
- select a colored word and add a new style favorite list of styles -
black black
dark gray dark gray
light grey light grey
yellow yellow Fluo Orange
red red Magenta
blue blue Cyan Lightblue
green green LightGreen
Author Michel_X 15/5/2005
I have done it the long way by adding it to Font > Styles > Favourite Styles but this long way seems a bit archaic for Apple.
The following shortcut works in TextEdit and some other apps, but not in Mail. In Mail, I still have to Control-Click and select Font > Styles. I can't even select the option in the Menu bar in Mail.
I did find a workaround for Mail. Drag as a text clipping highlighted text to the Desktop.
When you compose a message in Mail, drag in the clipping and edit the text.
Open System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts
Click on + to add a shortcut for All Applications.
Menu title > enter Styles… (use Option , for the three dots)
Enter Command R for shortcut.
You might need to quit and reopen the app for the shortcut to show up in the Menu bar.
Oops! Do not use the shortcut Command R in All Applications. When I first tested, I didn't get an error, but Command R in Mail is for Reply and having Command R set as shortcut for All Applications will prevent using the shortcut in Mail.
Select an individual app like TextEdit that you want to use the shortcut then set using Command R and you should be OK>
FWIW, I have no problem creating the highlight style and applying it to an email I am composing. The issue I've run into is when I send it, it doesn't arrive with highlighting and as I mentioned before, when I look in the "Sent" folder, despite the fact I sent it as rich text, it's plain text in the "Sent" folder.
As an aside, I decided to add my Gmail account to Mail which completely hosed my Gmail account by scrambling all the categories on the Gmail server. It also deleted all Gmails after Jun 1, somehow found 818 emails going back to 2011 which had long since been deleted. It screwed up things so badly in webmail I just went through everything and deleted.
I knew there was a reason I don't use email clients. 😎
Yes, my friend who has Outlook (on Windows) said that my colours came through with no problems and in his reply, my highlighted text was still there. I replied to him just to make sure I could still see them in the reply and yes, all okay.
Thanks for the extra colours! I only had Red, Dark Green, Purple and Yellow so am thrilled to have them.
I don't want to start trying to fix your email issues in this post, but I do suggest that your problems can be addressed. Gmail in particular is difficult to setup correctly in any email client. It's non-standard IMAP.
As to the emails that were supposedly deleted, I have found that when I used MailTabPro for Gmail, it failed to delete all my messages even when I moved to the Trash.
FYI...Deleting a message in your browser will not delete the message. It simply moves it from Inbox to All Mail. To really delete, you have to move the message to the Trash.
See this article on using Gmail in Outlook. I go over the basics of how Gmail works and how to make the correct setting in your browser. Once you clean up your labels, see the second article on how to use Gmail in Apple Mail starting with OS X Mavericks.
Connect Outlook for Mac 2011 to Gmail’s IMAP service
(Fair disclosure: Needhelp4Mac & OfficeforMacHelp are my site. I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from links on my site.)
dianeoforegon wrote:
I don't want to start trying to fix your email issues in this post, but I do suggest that your problems can be addressed. Gmail in particular is difficult to setup correctly in any email client. It's non-standard IMAP.
Diane, first I want to thank you for replying. I have been using Gmail through the web interface for something on the order of 10 years without issue. The only reason I tried adding Gmail to Mail was to see if it behaved differently than the one AOL mail account I had set up to test Mail. Unfortunately when I did that my emails were sorted into different categories than they were originally Out of frustration and not looking forward to moving everything back into place I deleted all the email I had in Gmail. A decision I soon regretted. It comes from being lazy. 😁
Thanks again but at this point there is nothing to "fix".
Happy 4th.
FYI,,,, when you use black it turns the text to white.
When upgrading or moving to a new Mac, your settings for styles are stored in your User's Library.
~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.TextEdit.savedState
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist
Highlight text & remove in Mail
