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Free Email TutorialsMac MailSend plain text email messages from Mac Mail

Send plain text email messages from Mac Mail

Mac Mail will by default use rich text formatting for email messages you compose from it: this is how you can make text bold, underlined, italic, colored, insert images in your emails, etc. While discussing the pros and cons of plain text email vs. rich text and HTML emails is beyond the scope of this tutorial, here's a summary: plain text email messages are lighter in size (since they contain nothing but text and new line characters), and they are less likely to be caught as spam or warned about in other email programs because they contain graphics, for example - on the flip side, plain text emails are just that: plain. Since most people's mail applications support rich formatting without a hiccup, compatibility concerns are mostly void. Nonetheless, we will show you how to disable rich text formatting and use instead plain text messages inside your Mail application on Mac OS X.

Turn off and disable formatting in email messages you compose

Switch back and forth between Rich Text and Plain Text for the current email message

Apple Mail Tip - If, after you have switched to plain text emails, you try to apply some kind of formatting to a message (like making the text selection bold, colored, or italic), Mac Mail will display the following confirmation message: "Convert this message to rich text format? - Changing the style or formatting requires that this message be converted to rich text format", followed with two buttons: "Keep Plain" and "Convert".

If you chose Convert, Mac Mail will apply the formatting options you requested, and this particular email message will be sent in rich text format, not plain text. But the nice thing, where Mail is playing smart, is that it will retain your global preference of "Plain Text" emails - in other words, what this tutorial showed you how to do is to set the default, but this doesn't mean that you cannot switch format on-the-fly!

To manually convert a message from , click on the Format menu when you are inside the email editor window: the option at the bottom reads either "Make Plain Text" or "Make Rich Text", and has a keyboard shortcut of Command+Shift+T to conveniently convert while typing.

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