How can I set a consistent font for Rich Text emails in Apple Mail? It is so unprofessional and embarrassing to see that RTF emails are displayed with Times New Roman when you get reply. Bloated html/span tag mails are a pain, but in some cases you have to highlight text. Switching to RTF mode to add 1-2 list items leads to Times New Roman emails on Windows Outlook and various webmail clients.
In a perfect world we would write plain text, only. In reality people use list items, bolding, highlighting all the time. Apple's Mail User Guide states: "If your recipients don’t have the same fonts that you used in your message, similar fonts are substituted for them." This is kind of a misleading information. It is not even working when Arial, Verdana or Helvetica is set as default font.
What is the issue?
Apple Mail does not set a font type to the rich text messages source code <font face="Arial"></font>). Thus, Outlook or any non macOS mail client uses its default paragraph formatting which falls back to Times New Roman.In a perfect world we would write plain text, only. In reality people use list items, bolding, highlighting all the time. Apple's Mail User Guide states: "If your recipients don’t have the same fonts that you used in your message, similar fonts are substituted for them." This is kind of a misleading information. It is not even working when Arial, Verdana or Helvetica is set as default font.
Workarounds
- Write plain text emails.
- Set Arial as default font in mail → Preferences → Fonts & Colours. Before sending new emails always make sure to manually change the font to Verdana or Helvetica. Finally, Apple Mail adds <font face="Verdanda"></font> to the RTF message. Seriously?
- Switch to a different mail client which I don’t like