Working with Stationery in Mail
If you’re anything like me, you use Mail, the all-purpose email application for Mac OS X, about 100 times a day. Most of the messages you send and receive are probably the vanilla-text email variety, with a few HTML emails thrown in for good measure. Wouldn’t it be great if you could add some pizazz to your own emails, without having to learn HTML?
That’s where Stationery templates come in. Stationery templates let you add a personal touch to your messages in Mail by clicking and dragging. With stationery, you can include photos, custom styles and more to produce professional-looking emails that can be used in a variety of settings: dinner invites, summaries of vacation trips, and more.
Using stationery is pretty simple—when you create a new message, click the Show Stationery button in the upper right hand corner of your New Message window (pictured below).
Once you do that, you’ll see a variety of template categories that you can browse, including templates for birthdays, announcements, sentiments, and more (pictured below):
To pick a particular template, click its icon. Mail will apply the template to your message. In the example below, I’ve chosen the Postcard template.
Once you’ve loaded a stationery template, you can click the Photo Browser in the toolbar and start dragging images from iPhoto to the placeholders in the template.
As you can see from the screenshot below, I’ve included some shots I took with my iPhone when we vacationed in Southern Ohio a few weeks ago—you can see images of a church in Zanesville, some wild flowers in the McConnelsville area, and the mill at Stockport.
I’ve also started working on new text, which you can do simply by clicking and editing the appropriate text fields.
Once you’ve got the text and images just right, add a subject line and recipients, and send it. The stationery template and added images will be attached to the message and sent to the recipients like any other email.
What if some of your recipients aren’t lucky enough to use Mail? Not to worry—most email browsers (like Gmail, pictured below) can still open the attached message and display it as you intended it.
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lenatpena80
April 03, 2010 at 7:01pm
its a good post and very informative. It help a lot creating a nice stationary mail. Love it. Thanks for sharing it.
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remo
December 18, 2009 at 4:28am
a stationery template, you can click the Photo Browser in the toolbar and start dragging images from iPhoto to the placeholders in the template.
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techchick99
August 18, 2009 at 10:49am
I love this Leopard feature ... and I love the additional stationery, that are available. Check out www.equinux.com or www.jumsoft.net for more info.
stringduster
October 12, 2008 at 5:06pm
I like this feature a lot, but one thing confuses me. In order to use Favorites, you have to HAVE favorites. Are those templates that have been dragged over from the other existing categories or are they brought in from outside? And, if they are or can be added from another source, where can these be found? The reason I ask is because as nice as the existing templates are, they don't always fit the bill for my needs. I was hoping there was another source that I could add them from. And, as I think about that, if I could corral them from somewhere else, I'm not sure I would know how to add them to the Favorites list.
jblocher
October 02, 2008 at 2:20pm
...but you meant stationery NOT stationary. The one with the "e" is a noun that refers to certain types of imprinted paper products, or (nowadays) to the digitally stored designs that go on them. The one with the "a" is an adjective that describes things that are fixed or unmovable.
jblocher
October 02, 2008 at 5:04pm
...by correcting your headline in the few hours since I posted the above. Your headline originally had "Stationary" when I opened it this afternoon, although the article mostly correctly said, "stationery." Now I see your headline has been corrected, making my comment above irrelevant. *Sigh*
psuberville
October 02, 2008 at 1:12pm
Stationary mail is great... But would be even better if you could include personal templates made in Pages. The biggest drawback is that if you type a long text and apply to a stationary template, you cannot go back to a plain looking mail if none of the templates looks right for you...
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