Issue with Mail not using rich text

Question

I'm using the Mail app on snow leopard and I can't seem to utilize the rich text functionality within the program. It is set to "Rich Text" via Preferences -> Composing but all my emails come in as plain text ("Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii").
Can someone help me with this?

Answer 1

So why does it have a default option to send as rich text then? Am I missing something?
"Rich Text" doesn't really mean anything unless you select the font size, font face, color, etc. As you can see, there is no place to do that in the Composing preferences. You have to do that in the New Message pane, or there isn't anything "rich" to send. Mail's Font preferences apply to local display, not to composing.
Mail has always behaved this way and the issue has been discussed dozens of times in these forums, because many people working in the Windows world want to have all their email sent out in rich text with a certain font and size by default. Mail lacks this feature, and there is no sign it will change, so some people switch to Entourage or Thunderbird.
A possible workaround in Mail is to use an html signature and start your message in the first line of that. Or use stationery.