I am no big fan of Apple’s Mail, but I do have a couple of observations. 1) Mail has never been terribly good at sorting… that have been complaints near forever about that. Spark has a great sorting capability if that is important. 2) The font thing is strange not so much because of Mail… I just learned after using Mail forever that the receiving party, if they do not have the font you have used installed on their computer they will never see the font you used! I did not know this until yesterday when the Developer of PopChar provided me with a screenshot of email I had sent that he did not have the fonts for. His Mail defaulted to the main font that he was using! So all my interest in using various fonts for personalization were a waste of time. I liked what I used and saw but my recipient saw only what his computer would allow! Unlike a PDF email does not embed the font! Jeepers what a shock. Addressing the Searching some have mentioned, again Mail has never been terribly good at this… there is one elegant, cheap and powerful solution for this made by Nisus…InfoClick. You can get a free fully functional trial from them… good for at least 2 weeks. Easy to use, hugely functional! Only works with Apple Mail. Been using it for years and adore it!!! Works fine in Big Sur too. Finally, as far us updating to Catalina, or updating to Big Sur, for me at least, the Big Sur update has been far easier. That may well be because I prepared completely before updating. I’m not sure. But so far I don’t have any problems like I had with Catalina.
Have Merry Christmas!!!
I’m not aware of any email app on any platform which has ever embedded fonts. At best they create html codes to tell the recipient machine what font you would like to be displayed if locally available. And Apple Mail doesn’t even do that unless to you set the font for each outgoing individually. Mail’s inability to set a default font for all outgoing email often leads users who want that feature to switch to Outlook or another app.
According to the PopChar people, no matter what email client you use, if the recipient does not have the font that you are using in your email, the recipient’s email will only display what he has onboard. Am I wrong that when I set the font and size in prefs for my email in Apple’s Mail that’s what it does? If not what is the purpose of the preference? I mean when I choose Caxton 16 as the default font every email that I send sure looks like Caxton 16 was used.
Apple Mail’s font preferences normally only govern local display. To see what font info is actually in your outgoing that can potentially affect display at the other end, you need to check the copy in your Sent folder with View > Message > Raw Source
Just checked RAW Source and it lists the specific font I used , size, spacing, color, and HTML etc. I am no expert and do not wish to bug anyone…I will only offer this quote from the PopChar developer and let the matter drop. My only reason for posting earlier was my disappointment that I chose fonts for the sake of personalization but they were not seen by the recipient. 
> By the way, this email is written in the Junicode Font.
This did not affect the message that arrived here. The message arrived with text in Lucida Grande (the default fallback font on my computer).
You can never expect that mail message arrive in the same way as you sent them, especially when you use fonts that are not available on the computer of the receiver. Fonts are never sent along with the message, so the receiver will see the message in a different font. Some mail programs even ignore font information altogether.
With best regards,
gue
Signing off now! Have an excellent weekend!
Yes, it is disappointing that email applications do not always look at the “metadata” describing how encoded characters are displayed. In the simple general case, an upper case ‘A’ is encoded in 8-bit ASCII as binary ‘01000001’. When displayed on teletype machines or CRT terminals like the VT100 it looks like whatever glyph the terminal designer has chosen. To enable a receiving Mail User Agent, MUA, to use something other than the default display glyphs (font) the desired display font identification information is carried as metadata in message headers rather than the body of the message. If the receiving MUA cannot use the requested font, it can only display using a local font.
Fonts are not included in email messages because of message size limits and because of font copyright limits. The default fonts available often depend on Microsoft/Apple OS choices and also fonts loaded as part of Adobe, Microsoft, or other third part applications.
Web site html files do not include fonts but rather HTML and CSS coding that refers to the desired display. – You can send messages in HTML format and change font settings for every character, but the receiving MUA can still only display font glyphs that are locally known.
If you absolutely want to control the recipient’s view of your text, you must send your special text as an image. But this still won’t work on character mode terminals.
Finally, this is not a bug, but is a designed feature.
I hear ya - still on Mojave due to Catalina screwing my 100K item library up so bad it took 5 months to get it fixed with engineers having to delete duplicates from the cloud in both the library and playlists - they seem to want to use Apple Music for everything instead of our own music - my two home pods will not play my music nor Apple Music since an update to iOS or the home pods a couple months ago - I can only stream from another device to them that I have shuffled my music or used a playlist from - seri will tell me that is not built into the seri app - shuffling your library? if I ask it to play my music library it says there was a problem with Apple Music - crazy stuff happening and they can’t seem to follow up on shit they tell me they are going to do after sending screen shots and videos of what seri says after a request etc etc - wondering if its time to abandon apple music and just use a music player and stream my music but do not know what to start with re the player - seems you must have Apple Music and family sharing to play music in more then one place and it seems like they will be abandoning iTunes Match they way things are working now - we shall see but it isn’t looking good right now!
I also experience the search function doing nothing, but return every email in you mailbox as a match.
If anyone hears of a fix for this I would sure like to know.
(Replying to myself). It’s been two weeks and Big Sur has been much more stable for me than Catalina ever was.
(MBP 13, 2017)
Amen to that!!!
Your experience matches that of the majority of users I’ve heard from. Catalina never felt finished to most of us.
I think it’s been quite a while since there was consensus that a macOS version felt finished when it was released. Not few would probably suggest Snow Leopard.
That’s not really the discussion here. Catalina never felt finished even after a number of updates. Big Sur feels in my case to be much closer to that semi-mythical state.
Maybe:
Team A worked on Apple Silicon
Team B worked on Big Sur
Team C worked on Catalina
in past times in various macOS versions, I have had the cursor disappear. I can make it appear again using “cmd-tab” and selecting the Finder.
I experienced that only on Catalina, never before IIRC. So far haven’t had it happen to me on Big Sur.
In general I have to say so far Big Sur appears to be less quirky for me that Catalina ever was. No more Spotlight maxing out the CPU or rogue CalendarAgent activity. I’m not sure the looks have won me over yet, but in my limited experience so far I’d say it feels like the more stable macOS. I’ll feel even better when SuperDuper can create bootable clones. CCC already does AFAIK.
I completely agree!!! Far, far few problems than I ever imagined there would be. As far as the new look goes, I truly dislike the new icons… but I can live with them. I am hoping that the TechTool folks and others catch up soon!
Well, I upgraded to Big Sur yesterday and - so far at least - I haven’t found any problems. The installation went quickly and easily with no problems. So far, so good.
Sam
Maybe Mail has to take some time to develop an index before the search function will work as mine is working now without any app update.