I have a deep, dark secret to admit: I often send email using HTML/rich text features. I know, it is shocking: but I fear the seductive features of things like fonts, bold facing, and colour have turned me from the true path of pure text.
When I started using the Macintosh, I set my email options to use rich text format for composing messages:
You’d think that, with this setting, any email message I compose would be formatted using rich text, right? Well, apparently Apple wants to think on my behalf. In their infinitely wise thinking, the setting above is actually more of a request than a command. Apparently, they think I mean “use rich text, if you think that’s wise”. Because what really happens with the above setting is that rich text/HTML format will be used *if* I put something in my email message that demands rich text. Like a font change, or a different colour. Otherwise, the message will still be sent as plain text.
I discovered this behavior after my friend Chris noticed that emails I was sending him were arriving devoid of any formatting, with lovely courier-style fonts. I don’t see a quick way to fix this other than to maybe select some kind of odd font or always make at least one character in every email I send boldfaced or some such. I’ll probably just ignore the problem for now