Format your emails: fonts, sizes, spacing and colors

Short answer: everything is in the toolbar above the email body. Select the text you want to change, then pick a text style (Paragraph, Heading, Subheading, Quote), a font, a font size (nine steps from 11 to 24 px), a line spacing (Compact, Normal, Relaxed), or a text color or highlight. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, bullet and numbered lists, indent, alignment, links, images, dividers, your variables and your signature all sit in the same row. A small floating toolbar also appears whenever you select text, so the common controls follow your cursor. One piece of advice before you start: the default — your recipient's own font, no styling — is deliberate. A plain-looking email reads like a message from a person and tends to get more replies; a heavily styled one reads like marketing mail and is more likely to land in the Promotions tab.

WarmySender runs your outreach on autopilot with AI agents across Cold Email, Email Warmup, LinkedIn, Instagram and Multichannel sequences — plus real-time email verification. Everything on this page you can do by hand, your AI agent can do for you in plain language; see how AI agents format the same emails below.

What's in the toolbar

The toolbar runs across the top of the email body wherever you write an email — the campaign wizard, the campaign builder, a sequence step, a template, and now your mailbox signature. Controls are grouped left to right:

Select any text and a small floating toolbar appears next to it with the controls you reach for most, so you don't have to travel back up to the top row for a quick bold or a link.

On a narrow screen the toolbar folds its least-used controls — strikethrough, divider, clear formatting, then indent, then the table and alignment controls — into a More formatting (…) menu at the end of the row. Nothing is removed; widen the window or open the menu.

Step by step, with examples

Change the font of the whole email

1. Click into the email body and select everything (Ctrl+A, or Cmd+A on a Mac).
2. Open the Font menu and pick one — for example Georgia for a warmer, more letter-like feel. The nine choices are all fonts that render reliably in email; web fonts are deliberately left out because most work inboxes block them and you end up with something unpredictable instead.
3. Leave it on Default if you want the email to arrive in whatever font your recipient's own inbox uses. That is the setting that looks most like an ordinary personal email.

Make one line stand out

1. Select the line.
2. Use the floating toolbar that appears: click Bold, or set a font size of 18 px, or apply the Subheading text style.
3. Resist doing this more than once in a short email — the more emphasis you add, the less any single piece of it means.

Add a short bulleted list

1. Put your cursor on a new line and click Bullet list.
2. Type the first item and press Enter for the next one.
3. Press Increase indent to nest an item under the one above, and Decrease indent to bring it back out.
4. Press Enter on an empty item to leave the list.

Add a link

1. Select the words you want to turn into a link — or place your cursor where the link should go and select nothing.
2. Click Link (or press Ctrl+K / Cmd+K).
3. Type the web address. If you had nothing selected, fill in the link text as well — that is the wording your reader sees.

Add an image

1. Click Image.
2. Paste a publicly reachable HTTPS address for the picture — images are hosted on your own site, a content network or an image host, not uploaded to WarmySender.
3. Add alt text (many inboxes hide images by default, and the alt text is what shows instead) and, optionally, a width — 600 is full width in most email clients.

Start over on a messy paragraph

Select it and click Clear formatting. Fonts, sizes, colors and highlights come off, and the text returns to the plain default. This is the fastest way to rescue text you pasted from somewhere else.

Line spacing, paragraphs, and Enter versus Shift+Enter

These are three different things and mixing them up is the most common formatting frustration:

• Enter starts a new paragraph. Paragraphs have a gap between them — that gap is what makes an email skimmable.
• Shift+Enter makes a line break inside the same paragraph. The next line sits directly underneath with no gap. This is what you want inside a signature or a short address block.
• Line spacing (Compact, Normal, Relaxed) controls the air between the lines within a paragraph. It does not change the gap between paragraphs.

So if your email feels cramped, first check whether you used Shift+Enter where you meant Enter. If the lines themselves feel tight, that's when line spacing is the right control. And if you want a wider gap between two blocks that is still one visual unit, a Divider often reads better than stacking blank lines.

Add a table

Click the Table button in the toolbar and drag across the grid to pick a size — up to six rows by six columns. The first row is a header row unless you untick the box. The table drops in at your cursor, already sized to the width of the email, and you type straight into the cells. Tab moves to the next cell, and Tab from the last cell adds a new row.

Put your cursor inside a table and the same button changes: it now lists the editing actions — insert a row above or below, insert a column left or right, delete a row or column, turn the header row on or off, merge selected cells, split a merged cell, or delete the whole table. Anything that cannot apply right now is greyed out rather than doing nothing; you cannot delete the last remaining column, for instance.

Why a table here is safe to send

Inboxes are the last place on the internet where tables are still the reliable way to lay something out, and the editor writes them the way email expects: borders and padding are set on each cell rather than in a stylesheet, the table declares itself as layout rather than data so screen readers announce it correctly, and no width tricks are used that Outlook silently ignores. A table you build here renders the same in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and mobile.

A table you wrote yourself — pasted in through the HTML code view, or brought over from an existing template — opens and edits normally too, and is saved back the way you wrote it. Your attributes and cell styling are kept rather than rewritten.

When to use one, and when not to

• Good uses: a short pricing comparison, a two-column "before / after", a small set of dates or figures a sentence would mangle — usually in a later step of a sequence, once a conversation exists.
• Avoid on a first cold email. A table is the single clearest visual signal that a message was produced rather than typed, and a first touch that looks produced reads as marketing mail. Keep the first email plain; put the table in the follow-up that answers a question they actually asked.
• Keep it small. Two or three columns at most. Anything wider is unreadable on a phone, where more than half of cold email is opened, and a table cannot reflow the way a paragraph can.
• Don't use one for layout. Two columns of body copy side by side look like a newsletter. Ordinary paragraphs are what a person's email looks like.

Every email you send also carries an automatic plain-text version, and a table is flattened into readable lines there — another reason to keep it to a few short cells.

Your signature, in the same editor

Each mailbox has its own signature, and it is now edited with the same toolbar (in a compact form) rather than typed as raw markup. Open Mailboxes, open the mailbox's settings, and go to the Signature tab. The toolbar there is a trimmed-down version carrying what a signature actually needs — font, size, text color, bold, italic, underline, alignment, a link and an image — plus the HTML code view if you already have one written. Headings, quotes, line spacing, highlight, lists, dividers and the merge tags are left out on purpose: a signature is a name, a role and a way to reach you, not a document.

To use it in an email, either click Insert signature in the toolbar, or type the {{signature}} variable where you want it. Both do the same thing: when the email goes out, that spot is replaced with the signature belonging to the mailbox that actually sent it. If your campaign rotates across several mailboxes, every recipient automatically gets the right one.

For cold outreach, keep it to three to five lines and avoid a logo or a row of social icons on a first email. A heavy signature adds weight and styling to a message that is trying to look like a personal note.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every shortcut below is one the editor genuinely honours — hover any toolbar button and it shows you the same binding.

Pasting from Word, Google Docs or Gmail

You can draft anywhere and paste in. Basic formatting survives the trip — bold, italics, headings, lists, links — while the invisible clutter that word processors carry along is dropped, so you don't end up with a wall of odd spacing and stray styling you can't get rid of.

Two habits make it painless:

• After pasting, glance at the status hint under the editor. If it says Styled and you didn't intend to style anything, select all and click Clear formatting.
• If you want the text with no formatting at all, paste as plain text (Ctrl+Shift+V / Cmd+Shift+V) and add your own emphasis afterwards.

HTML code view, for custom layouts

If you already have an email design — a hand-built template, something your designer produced — click HTML code view and paste it straight in. The editor keeps it exactly as written rather than trying to simplify it. Simple tables and ordinary formatting open normally in the visual editor afterwards; anything the editor could not reproduce exactly — column-width definitions, a stylesheet, a caption, a full newsletter layout — keeps opening in code view from then on, so nothing gets quietly rewritten underneath you.

While you're in code view the formatting buttons are switched off on purpose: they would be acting on a document you can't see. Switch back out to use them.

Use Preview and Send test before launching anything built this way — a custom layout is exactly the kind of email where the difference between the editor and a real inbox shows up.

"Plain look" or "Styled" — and why it matters

Under the editor you'll see a small hint reading either Plain look or Styled. It's a summary of what you've done to the email, not a warning, but it's worth paying attention to.

Inbox providers sort mail partly by how it looks. A message in a chosen font, at a chosen size, with colored text and a banner image looks like a newsletter — because that is what newsletters look like — and newsletters go to the Promotions tab. A message in the recipient's own default font, with a couple of paragraphs and no styling, looks like something a colleague typed, and that is the mail people reply to.

Practical guidance for cold outreach:

• Leave the font on Default and the size alone unless you have a reason.
• Keep the first email of a sequence plain and image-free. Save any styling for later steps, once the conversation exists.
• Use bold once, for the one thing you want read. Skip colors and highlights entirely in cold email.
• Keep a light signature.
• If the hint says Styled on a first-touch email, that's your cue to select all and clear formatting.

Formatting is one of several things that decide where mail lands. The others are keeping warmup running on the sending mailbox, correct sending records for your domain, verified recipients, and sensible daily volume. For the fuller picture see the deliverability guides in the documentation hub.

One thing you no longer have to think about: every campaign email now also carries an automatic plain-text version derived from your formatting. Well-behaved mail carries both a formatted version and a plain one, and having both improves inbox placement. It is built for you — there is nothing to turn on and nothing to maintain.

How AI agents format the same emails

Your AI agent — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, or any agent that speaks MCP — can write and format campaign emails for you in plain language: "write a three-step sequence, keep it plain, bold the first line of step two."

Agents write the same simple, inline-styled markup the editor produces, so anything an agent creates opens normally in the editor and anything you write by hand is readable by an agent. The properties they can set inline are the ones the toolbar exposes: font family, font size, text color, background color, line height, indent and text alignment. An agent can also send plain text with no formatting at all — often the right choice for a cold first touch.

Agents can also work from what you have already written: they can list your saved templates and build a campaign step from a template you name, so your proven copy stays the starting point rather than being reinvented each time.

The safety boundary is unchanged. An agent never sends a message directly and can never raise a limit. Creating or launching a campaign only writes it and hands it to the scheduler, which paces every email inside your safe caps and gradual ramp regardless of whether a person or an agent set it up. Connecting mailboxes and accounts stays in the app. To set your agent up, see connect your AI agent.

Frequently asked questions

How do I change the font and text size of my email?

Select the text you want to change — or press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac) to select the whole email — then use the Font and Size menus in the toolbar above the body. Fonts available are Default, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS and Courier New; sizes run in nine steps from 11 px to 24 px, and 14–16 px reads comfortably in most inboxes. Default means the email arrives in whatever font your recipient's own inbox uses, which is what an ordinary personal email looks like — that is why it is the default and why it is usually the right choice for cold outreach.

What's the difference between Enter and Shift+Enter?

Enter starts a new paragraph, which leaves a visible gap before the next block of text. Shift+Enter makes a line break inside the same paragraph, so the next line sits directly underneath with no gap — that's what you want inside a signature or an address block. Line spacing (Compact, Normal, Relaxed) is a third, separate thing: it controls the air between lines within a paragraph and does not change the gap between paragraphs. If your email looks cramped, check first whether you used Shift+Enter where you meant Enter.

Will formatting my email send it to the Promotions tab?

It can. Inbox providers sort partly on appearance, and a message with a chosen font, colored text and images looks like a newsletter — which is where the Promotions tab is for. A message in the recipient's own default font with a couple of plain paragraphs looks like something a colleague typed, and that is the mail people reply to. The hint under the editor tells you which side you are on: Plain look or Styled. For a first cold email, aim for Plain look — leave the font on Default, use bold once at most, skip colors and images, and keep your signature light. Formatting is only one factor; warmup on the sending mailbox, correct sending records for your domain, a verified list and sensible daily volume matter at least as much.

Can I write my email in Word or Google Docs and paste it in?

Yes. Paste straight into the editor — bold, italics, headings, lists and links survive, while the hidden clutter word processors carry along is dropped, so you don't inherit spacing and styling you can't remove. After pasting, check the status hint: if it says Styled and you didn't mean to style anything, select all and click Clear formatting. If you'd rather bring nothing across at all, paste as plain text with Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V) and add your own emphasis afterwards.

Can I put a table in a cold email?

Yes — click Table in the toolbar and drag across the grid to choose a size up to six by six, with or without a header row. Put your cursor in the table and the same button gives you insert row, insert column, delete row, delete column, header row on or off, merge cells, split cell and delete table. The table is written the way inboxes expect, so it renders the same in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and on a phone. Whether you should is a different question: a table is the clearest visual sign that a message was produced rather than typed, so keep the first email of a sequence plain and save a table for a later step — a short pricing or before/after comparison of two or three columns, never a wide grid and never as a page layout.

Can I use my own HTML email template?

Yes. Click HTML code view in the toolbar and paste your markup in — tables, custom layouts, a design your designer produced. It is kept exactly as written rather than simplified, and an email containing a layout like that opens in code view from then on, so nothing is quietly rewritten. The formatting buttons are switched off while you are in code view, because they would be acting on a document you can't see; switch back out to use them. Always use Preview and Send test before launching a custom layout — that is where the difference between the editor and a real inbox shows up.

How do I add my signature, and can each mailbox have its own?

Each mailbox has its own signature, edited with a trimmed-down version of the same toolbar (font, size, colour, bold/italic/underline, alignment, link, image) under Mailboxes → the mailbox's settings → Signature. To use it in an email, click Insert signature in the toolbar or type the {{signature}} variable where you want it to appear. When the email goes out, that spot is replaced with the signature belonging to whichever mailbox actually sent it — so a campaign rotating across several mailboxes gives every recipient the right one automatically, without separate campaigns. For cold outreach keep it to three to five lines and leave out logos and social icons on a first email.

Can my AI agent format emails for me?

Yes. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent or any agent that speaks MCP can write and format your campaign emails in plain language, using the same font, size, color, background, line height, indent and alignment the toolbar exposes — or plain text with no formatting, which is often the better choice for a first touch. Agents can also list your saved templates and build a campaign step from one you name. The safety boundary doesn't change: an agent never sends a message itself and can never raise a limit. Creating or launching a campaign only writes it and hands it to the scheduler, which paces every email within your safe caps and gradual ramp no matter who set it up, and connecting mailboxes stays in the app.

Related reading

• Why follow-ups stay in the same thread and inbox — threading, the other habit that makes a sequence read like a conversation
• Connect your AI agent — let an agent build, launch and manage your campaigns in plain language
• Deliverability FAQ — inbox placement, volume and sending-record basics
• Full documentation — Cold Email, Email Warmup, LinkedIn, Instagram and Multichannel guides