Using Format > Lists in Mail

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Wealey

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I find myself close to pulling my hair out trying to include a Bulleted or Numbered list in an email.

Pressing the Return key creates another Bullet / Number on the next line. Trouble is, I can't see how to create or increase the space at the end of an item, nor can I see how to create a second paragraph within a single Bulleted / Numbered list item.

I don't have this problem with Lists in my Word Processing programme. I can't understand why Mail does not apparently have similar formatting facilities.

I've found a partial solution by converting to Plain Text, creating the desired paragraphs and spaces, then converting to bulleted lists. Trouble here is, this prevents the use of Numbered lists. Introducing a space causes any subsequent item to be a number 1.

The final trouble is, that during the course of converting my nicely spaced out text to a Bulleted list, I can't have second thoughts and insert additional paragraphs. When I hit the Return key, I get an unwanted Bullet rather than a space on the next line. Converting back to Plain Text to get round this converts not just the line in question but everything that's gone before, obliging me to redo the lot.

Aarrgh!

Where am I going wrong?
 
Wealey said:
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Where am I going wrong?
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You are expecting an email client to behave like a word processing application. Email is not a Word document. For all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that you are going through on this issue, here is the real kicker. In the best case scenario, you will succeed in formatting your document exactly like you want it. You will sent it to everyone on your recipient list. What each one of your recipients see on their end is under the complete control of each recipient's email client. You have absolutely no control over how your recipients will view your formatting masterpiece.

You may have some control if you send HTML mail. However, this will be the case only for recipient's who have HTML-compatible email clients and who have not disabled the feature. You may also have some control if you send plain text in a monospaced typeface. However, the recipients' clients may default to a proportional typeface which renders your beautiful monospace formatting into a cocked hat.

The takeaway message is that are wasting your time. It is your decision whether or not to continue to waste it.
 
Oh dear! I see I've been labouring under a delusion. Your advice may be blunt, but it clearly gives the long and short of it. Thanks.
 
Thanks for your thought, Ranasta. Actually, I do this whenever I want to send a more substantial document.

It just seems a bit pointless to me for Mail to include the bulleting feature but in such a half-baked way.

But then, as MisterMe pointed out, even this is probably useless due to the incompatibility of various email clients.
 
Just to clarify: email was only originally intended for plain text, and that's all. Everything else: colors, formatting, bold, italics, even file attachments -- are all "hacks" on top of a protocol that supports nothing more than plain text.

This is why every email client handles these things a bit different, and you can never guarantee that what you send looks identical on the recipient's end... unless all you send is plain, unformatted text.

On the other hand, another "bastardization" of email that I despise is HTML-formatted email -- but, alas, out of all the "hacks" listed above, HTML email is the most "pure" of them all -- because HTML itself is nothing but plain, marked-up text. You may want to investigate sending HTML emails instead of RTF emails to gain some control over the formatting of the email itself.

Be aware, though, that many people (like myself) have HTML-formatting turned off in their email clients, so your nice, colored, image-laden emails come through on my side as jibberish code.

You can attain a great level of formatting using nothing more than spaces, carriage returns, newlines, and tabs -- all of which are supported in every email client known to man. I receive a great deal of newsletters formatted as plaintext, and they all look very professional and are all very readable. If you must artificially draw attention to a headline by making it bold and underlining it, maybe the wording of the headline itself needs reworking?

Just my $0.02... call me an old fogey, old-school purist -- I rather enjoy those monikers. :)
 
I have to say I share your preference for messages made readable by means of paragraphing (and good grammar) alone. At the same time, things such as italicized, bold or coloured fonts can help emphasize and clarify aspects of certain messages.

Regarding HTML vs RTF: My Mail Help mentions using "plain text or rich text (HTML) formatting", as though HTML and RTF (rich text formatting?) were synonymous. I don't understand. They're clearly different things according to both yourself and Wikipedia.

Finally, there are occasions when I would like to embellish a message with smileys or other cheery frivolities. It seems though that there is little available to Mail in this vein, at least not the slick, animated sort available to Microsoft emails. I gather this is the 'downside' of Mac's more secure operating system.

I had thought that the apple smiley at the end of your posting had indicated a fall from grace on your part - the emailed notification I received of your posting had only the colon bracket version - until I discovered that the smiley was a substitution made by this forum's software.
 
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Wealey said:
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Regarding HTML vs RTF: My Mail Help mentions using "plain text or rich text (HTML) formatting", as though HTML and RTF (rich text formatting?) were synonymous. ...
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Could you please post the complete sentence(s) that you took as implying that RTF and HTML were the same?

Wealey said:
I had thought that the apple smiley at the end of your posting had indicated a fall from grace on your part - the emailed notification I received of your posting had only the colon bracket version - until I discovered that the smiley was a substitution made by this forum's software.
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This is an example of why heavily formatted email is a bad thing.
 
Sorry for my delayed response.

The quote is from Mail Help / Writing messages in plain text or rich text - "You can compose messages using plain text or rich text (HTML) formatting".
 
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