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.