Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's take a look at Mail stationery.
So you may or may not have noticed when you go to compose a new message in Mail you can
choose from a bunch of stationery.
The button is right here; stationery pane, and you have different categories that you
can look through.
For instance plain stationery, photos, things like that, sentiments.
So you can select one of these and you get this rich text formatted html email and you
can change the text in it to anything you want.
Often times you can change more than one text field.
It's got a background color and they usually have images and you can switch easily between
these and in some cases you can even drag a photo to an area to customize the stationery.
So you have a lot of different options here and there is a lot of different things that
come with Mail.
Now one catch is that the person on the other end has to have something that can receive
and display this complex email.
If they are just using a very basic email client or they are viewing it on an online
web based email they may not be able to see it.
Obviously, if they are also using Macs and/or using iPads and iPhones it should display
perfectly as Apple has designed it for that.
But if they are using something else, something older or something at work it may not look
perfect.
Now you can also create your own stationery but maybe not at quite the level that you
have seen in the examples.
So when you are composing a new message, you can go in here.
Make sure that in Mail, by the way, that you have it set to message format Rich Text or
this won't work.
Then you can compose a message here and use Rich Text.
Turn on the format bar so you can see things like fonts and colors and then you can compose
your text and create something like this where I've created some text with some fonts and
I've centered it and I've dropped in an image here and I've changed font sizes.
Things like that.
So this might be something that I want to reuse over and over aging just filling in
some extra text here.
What I can do is to is say File/Save As Stationery and then give it a name.
Now when I want to create a new message with this I can compose a new message, and then
I can click on the stationery button here, go down to Custom and you can see I have "Work
Party" and it fills all that stuff in.
I can go and customize this particular email here with some text
and then send it out.
Another way you can customize it, if you are a kind of designer/hacker is to go into your
hard drive level, go into Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery.
Under there you can find more folders that dig even deeper and you can see all the different
pieces of stationery in here.
You can go and customize them.
You can see it is quite complex with different folders for different languages and different
pieces to it.
So I'm not really going to go into how to customize this.
I'm not going to do it myself.
But if you are the type that likes to do it you can start looking into it.
Now another thing you can do is kind of tack mail.
You may already know this.
You can copy.
So I selected and copied the top banner from my website.
Mail really does a good job letting you copy stuff in Safari and then paste it into a Mail
message.
It will take the html.
So I've copied everything from the top toolbar.
I'm going to switch to Mail.
You can see I've already pasted in things in the top toolbar there.
So it is kind of a way for me to get some advanced html into a message.
Once I do this, I can save this, for instance as stationery, and I would always have a way
to start off an email with everything here including all the links in my nav bar for
MacMost.
If you are a web designer you could design pages in whatever tool you use, simply view
them in Safari, copy everything in there and then paste it in Mail.
It is a very easy way to create html email and then create stationery from a html email.
But that's not it where stationery is concerned.
If you go to the Mac App Store you will find that a few companies provide additional pieces
of mail stationery that you can download as apps.
With the apps what you actually do is install that inside of Mail.
So if you want more stationery and want to spend a little money on it you can get that.
In addition to that there is also at least one app here that claims to allow you to design
mail stationery.
It seems to be a html editor with lots of features.
I have not tried it myself and there may actually be more if you look outside the Mac App Store.
So there's a look at the different aspects of Mail stationery.
How to use it and how to create your own.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.