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:

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.]

Everyone’s talking about it, so why not join in? Mail Act-on is everyone’s plug-in of the moment. Reviews on 43 Folders, MacOSXHints, About.com, Amit Gupta’s Blog and MacWorld rave about the time it saves and the neatness it brings to your inbox.

Mail Act-on is a plug-in that allows you to create rules, which at the press of a keystroke move emails out of your inbox into any folder that you set. It’s amazingly flexible. Any action you can set in an Apple Mail rule, you can get this thing to do – moving, copying, setting the colour of the subject line, the list goes on and on. Hit a configurable “hot-key” (set to “`” by default) and a list of your rules pops up. Hit the relevant key and the highlighted message has gone to its new home.

Some reviewers recommend combining its use with a “Respond-Action-Hold-Waiting-Archive” schema of folders for sorting mail and getting über-efficient. That’s not for me. I soon forget about the emails I moved into the Action folder, or worry about which of the folders a particular email should be in. But even without this extra step, my inbox is smaller and I deal with things faster.

Mail Act-on is free, although the creator, Scott Morrison, accepts donations. You can download it from his web site.mail act-on, scott morrison, filing, email, rules, plugin, keyboard shortcut, mail.app, apple mail