How to Format Emails on Mail for Mac the Easy Way

Want to format your emails for some extra style and pizazz on the Mac? If you want to change the style and format of emails in Mail for Mac to customize the appearance of any email composition, forward, or reply, you’ll find there’s an optional and handy email formatting toolbar that can be made visible and used at any time in Mail on the Mac.

The Mail Format bar will give you controls to change and set email font family, font size, font colors, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, align left, align center, align right, insert bulleted and numbered lists, indent and outdent, and more.

How to Format Emails on Mac with the Mail Format Bar

1. Open Mail for Mac
2. Open any email compose window, either a new email composition, a reply, or forward
3. Look at the top of the mail composition window and click the [A] button

The Mac Mail format bar options are significant, looking from left to right at the format bar and using those tools can allow you to change the format, style, and appearance of emails with the following formatting options:

• font family
• font size
• font color
• font background color
• bold text
• italic text
• underline text
• strikethrough text
• align left
• align center
• align right
• insert bulleted and numbered lists
• indent and outdent

Many of these email format options also include associated keyboard shortcuts too, like command+B for bold and command+I for italics.

You can stylize and format the appearance of an entire email by adjusting the settings right away, or you can stylize and format email appearances by manually choosing the format options as you compose an email.

You can also select specific text or characters and stylize those independently from other text in the email window.

Using mail formatting options will require the message to be sent as rich text, so if you’re using plain text for emails you would need to convert the email message to rich text.

If you’re attempting to format an email that is set as plain text, the Mail app will ask if you want to convert the plain text email to rich text.

You can convert an individual email from plain text to rich text without it changing the general email composition setting for plain text.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this is intended to stylize and format specific email options, and is not intended to be used as a method to change all of Mail fonts or their font size. If you do want to change the Mac Mail font and font size you can do so with these instructions however, which can be used to improve readability of emails on the Mac client.