the Life of Zim

[For the quick answer to fix Notes in the Mail app from failing skip to the final paragraph]

I love Apple and most all of there products, which is why it pains me so much when they royally f*** up the simplest things. Some time ago I started trying to use Notes in the Mail app to help keep myself more organized. I was also curious if I could sync my Mail notes with my iPhone Notes (which I the time you couldn’t). Soon I realized that Notes did not work properly in the Mail app. Pressing the “New Note” button or selecting “New Note” from the File menu did nothing. It simply would not work. Upon investigation more online I could only find that some people were experiencing the issue and some were not, but absolutely nothing on any sort of fix.

With the release of the 3.0 firmware for the iPhone and the new capability of syncing iPhone Notes with Mail Notes, I started up on the quest that I had left behind months prior. I was able to sync with my iPhone but trying to look at any of the notes in Mail would just cause mail to hang while trying to load the Note. Basically I’d have to force quit. This time I felt quite determined to find the problem. I began digging through my Library folder and anything else I could think of that could have possibly effected my Application. Oh, one thing to note here, I knew that it wasn’t global issue on my machine, logging in as a different user I could use the Notes functionality in Mail just fine.

So I kept digging and diggin infuriated by the fact that Notes would not work with my user only. Finally I came across a post in the Apple Discussion pages. And what did it say!?

I just read another post that says you need to have the font “Marker Felt” installed and activated for notes to work correctly. I tried it and it works!

Are you f***ing kidding me!? That’s the problem? A font wasn’t active? For months I’ve been frustrated by Apple’s inability to use a default font that isn’t as obscure as “Marker Felt”. How about if Marker Felt isn’t available you just use some other Sanserif font? How difficult can that be? Instead the whole functionality of Mail completely fails.

So. If you’re having the same issue, that is, Notes in Mail is not working for you. Try this solution. Activate the font: Marker Felt. To do this open Font Book, in the upper left hand corner select “All Fonts”. Scroll down on the middle column until you find “Marker Felt”, right click and select “Enable Font”. Done. Notes should work now (assuming there isn’t some other asinine issue with Mail).