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Setting a minimum HTML font size

I have written before about the eye-bending frustration of small font sizes in Apple Mail.

Usually these are HTML emails composed in Outlook or Outlook Express.

The tips I blogged before about turning HTML off completely or toggling the view between the Plain Text and HTML portions of the email are still good ones, especially these keyboard shortcuts:

You can view the plain text version using the keyboard shortcut “Command-Option-P”, or toggle through the available formats using “Command-]” and “Command-[".

But here's another work around if small font sizes bug you too. It adds a new key to your com.apple.mail.plist file that will govern the size of HTML text.

1. Quit Mail

2. Open the Terminal and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

3. Restart Mail.app and your HTML messages are readable.

Of course you can set the point size to whatever you like.

[Via comments on this post at macOSXHints.]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 27th October, 2005 at 9:48 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

17 Responses to “Setting a minimum HTML font size”

  1. MILE says:
    October 30th, 2005 at 1:55 pm

    Great tip…and it actually works…! But now my signatures — which are in 12 pt. Verdana — seem to be blown up to 16 pt. or so…!?! And the font size can’t be altered anymore, it seems…!?!

    It does still say that it is “Verdana 12 pt.” but it’s being displayed much bigger…!

    Any suggestions how to get that fixed…?!

  2. MILE says:
    October 30th, 2005 at 2:03 pm

    Okay, my mistake…! Actually my sigs used to be 10 pt. and now they are 12, which just looks huge…! ;-)

    I just hadn’t expected the hack to work for the signatures as well, so I got confused a bit, sorry…! Although it’s pretty obvious that it would alter *all* HTML or RTF content…

  3. Tim says:
    October 30th, 2005 at 2:35 pm

    Excellent. Nothing like a tip that acutally works! :-)

    Of course, this only affects the way that HTML displays on your Mac. The people that you send HTML emails to won’t see a huge sig; it will still look 10 pt to them.

  4. Grant Barrett says:
    November 17th, 2005 at 1:37 pm

    Finally! I’ve been frustrated with this since 10.4 came out. Now everything appears at a reasonable size…

  5. John McGill says:
    November 20th, 2005 at 3:15 pm

    Does this only work with Tiger? I use 10.3.9 and it didn’t work – unless I’m an idiot (which I might be)

  6. Tim says:
    November 20th, 2005 at 8:08 pm

    Hmmm… I don’t know about Panther. I’m an early adopter type, so I have no Panther machines around to double-check this.

    Do other keyboard shortcut workarounds provide you with any relief?

  7. John McGill says:
    November 21st, 2005 at 4:17 am

    well I have gone with customizing toolbar and dragging small A and larger A, seems the most convenient (until I get Tiger for Xmas!)

    thanks

  8. Joshua says:
    May 26th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

    I’ve done this trick — with the minimum size.

    here’s what happened after:

    Even though my default font is set to Arial 11 and my Sig File the same, when I send an email to PC Outlook the message body appears in Times and only the sig file has the right formatting — Arial 11. I cannot figure out how this happened!

  9. Russ says:
    January 25th, 2007 at 3:30 am

    Thanks for the tip! This has been a great annoyance since I’ve started using Mail.app. Now…if someone can just tell me how to get Mail to delete messages from the server (e.g. Gmail) when I empty them from the trash in Mail – then I’ll really be a happy camper!

  10. Alistair says:
    June 29th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    Thanks, this tip has noticeably lowered my stress level today.

  11. Rebecca says:
    December 27th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

    I’m not sure if this is a related question or not…I play cards on yahoo and with my new Mac the type in the yahoo window is incredibly small! I have adjusted the minimum font size on my new MacBook Pro but it doesn’t seem to apply to the yahoo window. Is there any fix?

  12. Tim Gaden says:
    December 28th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    You’re right. This is not a Mail-related problem.

    Are you using Safari or Firefox? Drop me an email (address is in the sidebar of the front page — http://www.hawkwings.net/ ).

  13. Philipp says:
    December 11th, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    Thanks a lot for this valuable tip, that really makes it easier on the eyes!

  14. Rafa says:
    September 30th, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    Could you tell me if it runs on Snow Leopard? Thanks.

  15. edi says:
    November 17th, 2009 at 10:34 pm

    how do i set a minimum HTML font size for ENTOURAGE (affecting only the way that HTML displays on my Mac. The people that I send HTML emails to should not see a bigger font size)?
    Thanks.

  16. Barely Legally » If You Can Read This, I’m Not Using Outlook says:
    November 11th, 2010 at 5:16 am

    [...] Fortunately, Mail.app has a setting to force a minimum font size for HTML emails, which can be changed in Terminal.app.  The command is found in this post from HawkWings.net: [...]

  17. Jan van Duren says:
    April 26th, 2011 at 7:10 am

    I tried your advice to increase minimum font size in mail but I am not familiar with “Terminal”. When I open it, it says “last login” and so on.
    After adding your line “defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13″ Terminal asks me “Save as” (with “terminal saved output” preset en where (reset = my home computer file = the one with my name). After restarting mail nothing has changed. I have an IMac and the latest Snow Leopard version including update. Any suggestions?

    Thanks,
    Jan

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