Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite

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From	Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com>
Newsgroups	comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject	Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite
Date	6 May 2015 13:19:01 GMT
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On 2015-05-06, dyera@not.freeshell.org.invalid <dyera@not.freeshell.org.invalid> wrote:
> In Mail, Preferences Fonts & Colors Message Font doesn't seem to do 
> anything.
>
> Is this a problem on my machine or is it like this for everyone?
>
> Some e-mails display with the fixed-width font and font size I have 
> specified. But there is a certain amount of e-mail in my inbox that shows 
> up with random fonts, usually in sizes I can't read without increasing the 
> font size.

Those aren't truly random font styles. They are font styles that have
been specified by the person who wrote the message, and the messages in
these cases are HTML rather than plain text.

> I figured that setting the message font in Preferences would allow me to 
> skip any rich text or html formatting that came through, and not have to 
> increase text size on so many messages. Am I way off-base here?

The setting does not apply to HTML emails. It applies only to plain text
messages.

> It also seemed to me that there ought to be an option to display plain 
> text under View -> Messages but that option is not there. It may be 
> something I recall from 10.6.

I remember there being an option to display plain text portions of HTML
mails in past versions of Mail (Command-Option-P, IIRC), but don't see
it in the more recent versions. Not sure Apple would see fit to remove
that useful feature. : ( Of course it didn't work for messages that did
not have a text/plain part. Some don't.

There used to be a hidden preference to instruct Mail to display plain
text parts automatically, but reportedly recent versions no longer honor
the setting:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

You can use the View > Message > Raw Source command to view the entire
message source, which admittedly is not optimal because headers, HTML
parts, attachment parts, and character escape sequences are included,
making reading more difficult than it would be if you could simply
display the plain text portion.

> Ideally I'd like to know what others are doing - do you all increase font 
> size continually like I do, and just complain less?

Luckily, the vast majority of HTML messages I receive are advertising
messages, which aren't very important to me. I usually just adjust the
size of the messages individually if needed. I suppose if it bothered me
enough, I'd look into using a third-party email client.

I'm not sure if the current versions of Mail respect this, but there is
a hidden preference setting that allows you to specify the maximum font
size for HTML messages - you might give it a shot to see if it helps
you:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

-- 
E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my ravenous SPAM filter.
I often ignore posts from Google. Use a real news client instead.

JR

Thread

Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite dyera@not.freeshell.org.invalid - 2015-05-06 04:51 +0000
  Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2015-05-06 13:19 +0000
    Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite dyera@not.freeshell.org.invalid - 2015-05-10 18:52 +0000
      Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2015-05-12 01:06 +0000
  Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2015-05-07 20:49 +0000
    Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite dyera@not.freeshell.org.invalid - 2015-05-10 18:56 +0000
      Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2015-05-12 05:43 +0000
        Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com> - 2015-05-12 14:04 +0000
          Re: Mail.app font for messages - Yosemite Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2015-05-12 14:28 +0000

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