How To Create Email Templates In Mojave Mail

The old Stationery function is gone in macOS Mojave, but you can still create email templates you can easily access. The trick is to build draft email messages and then move them to a custom mailbox. Then you can grab one of those messages and send it, customizing it as you see fit. In addition, you can use Pages instead of Mail to compose your templates as some features like tables are only available this way.



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Closed captioning for this video is available on YouTube: How To Create Email Templates In Mojave Mail.
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. MacMost is brought to you by the more than 300 people who contribute to the MacMost Patreon Campaign. Find out how you can become a part of it at macmost.com/patreon.

So let's take a look at Mail and using Mail templates. Now before Mac OS Mojave you had the ability to have stationery. There were all these preset stationery templates that you could use and even create your own. The problem with stationery was that they really didn't look good on mobile devices and you really couldn't count on them looking good on non Mac devices anyway. So it was really a bad idea to use complex layouts like in stationery with more than half the people now reading their email on mobile devices. You want to keep things simple.

But suppose you do need some basic template functionality. Like you send out the same email every month with just a few changes. You can still create templates and I'll show you how to do it. So I'm using Mac Mail here and I'm going to create a new email message and I'm going to leave everything blank here at the top but I'm going to add a subject. Then I'm going to add some body text here. I'm going to add a little flourish to it. Some styling and things like that.

So you can see here I've done a few things. I've colored some text. I've changed a font here and there. I've put an image in there. You can easily use the tools at the top here to make some changes. Change a font size. Make it bold. Even change the color if you want. You can even justify things. So I can center that text there.

Now that I've got that I'm going to Close this window and it's going to say Do you want to Save this message as a draft. So I'm not going to send this to anybody. I'm going to save it as a draft and it's saved. So a Draft is an email that you can get back to later to complete it. If I go into my Drafts folder, there it is. I can actually double click on it. Now fill out the rest here, like who this is going to, and send it. But I'm not going to do that here.

Instead I'm going to create a new mailbox. I'm going to click here and create a New Mailbox. Create it on iCloud since I'm using iCloud for all my email. It should work no matter where you create the mailbox. But iCloud will be nice because it will be available on my MacBook as well as on my desktop Mac. I'm going to call it Stationery. Now that I've create this new folder here I'm going to drag this message to Stationery. So it's go out of Draft and into Stationery. Now that it's there I can select it, and if I actually double click it I can read it but I can't Edit it.

So in order to send it what I want to do is with it selected I can go to Message and Send Again. Notice there's even a keyboard shortcut for it. Now I get this message into a new email message here. I can fill out who it's to. I can then fill in the spaces down here, date, location, topic, that I had or maybe you don't have any of those. Everything else is there and I can send that email. I still have the main copy of it here in Stationery. So I can add a few of these here in Stationery, select the one I want, Send Again, and then send it out. So it's a really easy way to create these templates that you can reuse in Mail.

Now it was kind of limiting on what I could do here with the tools inside of Mail. Just these basic formatting things here. But you can actually do more. Mail can handle more than that. As a matter of fact I've created this message here in Pages and I have a textbox here and I've filled it in. It's actually a shape here and I've filled that in. I put that image here. I put a table in there. You can add other things like I can add more shapes. I can add more images. You know and put them there. So I'll just put, for instance, that shape there.

The key thing is under Arrange you need to set Text Draft to InLine with Text. So, you know, Mail is going to want it all to be kind of inline with text. So if you set your images, your shapes, things like a table all to Inline with Text then everything should work fine. Then you should be able to Select All, Copy, and then switch back to Mail here. I can Paste this all in here and you can see how it paste it in here. It converts somethings to images. It keeps other things as editable like for instance this table here is still editable. This is now an image since Mail doesn't handle shapes. But you can play around with it and get, you know, different effects, different things that you want, and see what is compatible between Pages and Mail.

If you try to go in Pages and some of the templates they have they aren't going to work at all. As a matter of fact some of the complex ones, if you paste them in, they're just going to paste in as a full image. Which may be fine. Maybe if you want to do that what you want to do is export as a PDF and send the PDF in an email. But if you're looking for something to use as a template you can do a few extra bits here by composing in Pages, experimenting, and then pasting into an email message like this one. I can Save this, also as a Draft, and then I can move it down from Drafts into Stationery here. I didn't assign a subject for this one because see how the subject I assigned for this one appears here. Subject is a really good way to figure out which template is which in your new Stationery folder.

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