Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tips: Force email to be plain text
There are some people that like the sleekness of HTML email, then there are those that appreciate the simplicity of plain text email (no images or styled text, thanks very much). If you use Mail.app and want it to force all incoming email to display as plain text, then open Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type in the following command: defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUENow when you receive an email, Mail.app will only show you the plain text of the message. To reverse this command, just replace "TRUE" with "FALSE."
Like this tip? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections for more.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
uhuznaa said 5:44PM on 9-03-2008
A few reasons why this isn't a good idea: First, there will be only a text-only version displayed if there is one included in the first place. Second, even if there is a text-only version included, it will be only the text, without any links that may be in the HTML version and since there is *no* indication that you're actually looking at a text version of an HTML mail, you may easily miss things without even noticing.
Since most of the time the major annoyance of HTML mail in Mail.app is the very tiny font (when the mail was written on a Windows system which displays fonts much larger) the better solution is this instead:
defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 12
This will force all HTML mail to be displayed with a minimum font size of 12 points, which is perfectly readable.
Reply
Adam Leventhal said 6:48PM on 9-03-2008
Is there some way to get apple's Mail application to wrap text at 80 columns? I still get my nettiquette from a pre-HTML world where going over 80 columns is considered poor form -- I find myself manually hitting return like I'm on a typewriter...
Reply
James Bachman said 7:54AM on 9-04-2008
Does anyone know of an iPhone solution to the tiny text problem? Too many emails from Windows systems that are unreadable in iPhone Mail, and when zoomed into require scroll back and forth across the screen to read.
Reply