About MessageFont

MessageFont lets you set Apple Mail’s default composition font for rich text outgoing messages.

Background

The message font setting in Mail preferences affects local display only. This formatting is lost when messages are viewed in different email applications. For instance, in Outlook, emails with no font formatting are displayed in Times New Roman. In Apple Mail, they show up in Helvetica. The inability to easily set the default font for outgoing mail messages is a source of constant frustration for many. While the emails look fine during composition, they do not look the way they intended to when received.

Discussion

There are numerous threads on Apple’s Discussion Boards that discuss this problem:

While there are several workarounds and hacks to force Apple Mail to embed the font in messages–such as using the formatted text from a signature or manually changing the font using the Font panel–they can be cumbersome, time-consuming or unreliable.

If Outlook for Mac, Thunderbird and other email applications can set the default composition font, why can’t Apple Mail do the same?

Introducing MessageFont

MessageFont ensures the font¹ you set is embedded correctly into your rich text outgoing messages². MessageFont is an application that interfaces with Apple Mail by overriding Mail.app’s keyboard shortcuts for New Message, Reply, Reply All and Forward Message. It also has shortcuts for inserting and replacing text with properly font-formatted text in your new messages. Read the documentation to learn how to use MessageFont.

Click the images below to see how emails are displayed on various browsers and computers with and without MessageFont.