In Mail, how to show misspellings without automatically correcting them?

Question

When writing a new e-mail in Mail, one can set spell-checking either to ask about corrections after one has finished the message and clicks 'Send', or to show each misspelt word and offer a correction as one types. The latter saves a great deal of time, but it has a major disadvantage: if one wants a particular unorthodox spelling but misses that a suggestion has appeared and continues to type, the correction goes in without one's noticing it. In many applications (e.g. Pages, Word, etc.) a misspelling is flagged up by a red underscore, but if one continues typing it is one's own idiosyncratic spelling that goes in. Is there any way of achieving this in Mail?

Answer 1

Thanks, dianeoforegon — of Portland, I seem to remember from a previous discussion. But you may have missed the following from my post: '…one can set spell-checking either to ask about corrections after one has finished the message and clicks 'Send', or to show each misspelt word and offer a correction as one types. The latter saves a great deal of time…' (emphases added). I knew that one could set spell-checking to occur when one had completed one's message and clicked 'Send', but my point was that that wastes a lot of time, especially if one has used foreign words or unconventional spellings (I like to use 'z' instead of 's' in words with Greek rather than Latin roots, for instance, such as 'energize') which one wants to accept. This method even invariably throws up the addressee's e-mail address as a misspelt word because of the '@' as well as because names are not usually dictionary words.
What one really wants, in my opinion, is a setting whereby each unusual word or spelling is flagged up as one types it, but the version one has typed is the one that is retained by default. That is what happens with the red underscores in Pages, etc. But I realise (realize? no; from Latin 're', not from Greek) that Apple have gone for everyday speed of typing with conventional spelling, not for idiosyncratic writers.