robg - I think you need to do this with Mail NOT running, otherwise when you quit mail it will overwrite your change. It worked for me this way.

Woohoo! now those damn html emails that crash Mail are not a problem.

I have seached this site and Google and I have not found any definite answers to this.

Can Mail's attachment encoding be changed to something other than AppleDouble?

Now I no longer have to hit APPLE-OPTION-P (Show-->Plain Text Alternative) in order to read the messages from all of my misguided friends using Windows and Outlook who create silly backgrounds and try to use their corporate font in their email.

This hint works great on my system (OSX 10.2.6, Mail 1.2.5)!

I've been looking for this solution for a long time. I'd been considering switching to mutt or some other email client, simply because of Mail's stupid insistence on displaying html as the default. How Apple could overlook such a basic and necessary preference is beyond me, and my tolerance for having to try to read microscopic html text was getting progressively less. Many thanks to the poster of this hint. Made my day!

robg- Are you taliking about "Content-Type: text/html" mails or "Content-Type: multipart/(alternative|mixed)" mails with an html part? This is working fine for my multipart emails. I can't check what this does with text/html mails (these are deleted from the server before I get them, which is effective in blocking a ton of spam), but it could be that Mail is displaying the html content as html rather than text when html is all that's available. Just a thought.

You mentioned "microscopic" text. Just wanted to point out that, in Mail, you can use CMD-+ [if you've got a keyboard with the 10-key numpad on the right side] to enlarge text. Sadly, CMD-= doesn't work for this, although some other apps, such as Safari, let you use CMD-= to enlarge text. I'm not lucky enough to have access to a PowerBook, so I don't know what you can do on that keyboard.

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osxpounder

I have seached this site and Google and I have not found any definite answers to this.

Can Mail's attachment encoding be changed to something other than AppleDouble?

Ahh, so much better. Now I can scroll the email with the up/down arrows also. Please, more hits about Apple Mail.app.

One thing that I am doing is writing a GUI version of Mutt for OSX. But that is going to take years with my skills.

Excellent stuff, works a treat on html emails for me.

Woohoo! "'scuse me while I kiss this guy"![*] This is great, have complained to Apple about it, why didn't they tell me?

[*] Yes, I know that is not the real lyric.

does anyone know how to get text attachments to actually show up as attachments instead of inline with the email body?

That annoys me as well, but I think the reason is that some mailers (Bad Mailers) send text attachments with a MIME Content-disposition of `inline', which OSX Mail correctly interprets as a request that this content be included inline rather than as an attachment.

This is a mixture of a little experimentation and some guesswork, so I might be wrong or otherwise adrift on this.

Best hint all year. Well, except for mine! hah!

Running 10.2.6 and Mail 1.2.5 (v552), I quit Mail.app, waited a bit and then did the defaults write method of updating the preferences. Checked by doing the defaults read on the same to be sure it took.

Fired up Mail.app again, looked through my unread mail to find a likely HTML candidate and it opened with the usual HTML stuff, no plain text.

Any ideas folks?

didn't work for me the first few times. then i tried rob's terminal method and it now works.

i still get some html messages that display as html (perhaps the ones that have nothing but images?) but others are displayed in all text.
very nice

try it again

Some emails contain nothing *but* html formatted text. You should be able to type cmd-[ and cmd-] to cycle through the different parts, this is how I viewed the plain text versions before (some emails didn't have a plain text version).

HTH, Jennifer

I had hoped this hint would fix my own pet peeve, but it did not, as far as I can tell. What I would *really* like is for the Mail.app to *properly* quote the message to which I'm replying. During editing of a reply, Mail places a highlight bar in the left margin next to quoted text. What it actually sends, however, doesn't differentiate at all between quoted lines and new lines ('>' is the most commonly accepted tag for quoted lines). It makes my reply very difficult to read.

Suggestions, anyone? Or am I missing something simple?

I think that this is a "format=flowed" standard way of quoting email. Eudora does this too and I don't like it. In Eudora there is some way of setting the default to be the "old fasioned" way with ">", but I don't reacall how. In Eudora what I do is usually select the offending text and make Eudora line-wrap it, which results in the ">" behaviour I want. I have a Eudora button for this (and one for "unwrap" too - very useful.

In any case, I don't know how to make Mail.app do this.

Excellent!

Somehow I had this enabled by default in mail under 10.2 but when I upgraded to panther it all went horribly wrong... i only stumbled on this post by searching "plain text alternative" which i eventually found in the view menu... why this isn't a preference in the actual preferences pane is just rude...

guess i better start looking more closely in those library files...

Still works in Tiger. Nice... :)

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:: Jedi Knight ::
-- Mac Rules! --

This no longer seems to work in 10.4.2 and Mail 2.0.3.

Can anyone tell me how to prevent that horrid html from leaking through?

Still works for me (OS X 10.4.3, Mail 2.0.5) but I have the opposite question: what if I want to revert to the original setting, i.e. to re-enable the display of html mail? I looked at the pref file but wasn't sure where to make the necessary changes. Actually I deleted some bits that I thought forced mail to display plain text but that screwed up Mail, luckily I had made a backup before I started to mess around with it...

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool FALSE

should work, but...

I still can't get it to work. OS X 10.4.3 and Mail 2.0.5. Mail still insists on displaying that horrible html stuff.

By the way

defaults read com.apple.mail

should display all the default options for mail. Could someone post the result for a setup where Mail does not display html?

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Can you narrow this command to only cause plain text for all junk mail - in the junk mail folder? Not all messages in Mail.

Is there a more specific place in com.apple.mail to place the code to do so?

For some reason this has just been dugg --- a bit late now, as this is from 2003.

But for those who were asking, "Why doesn't it work?" -- perhaps you have an HTML-only mail there not a _multipart_ message.

This preference prefers plaintext, where a choice exists; it doesn't convert HTML to plaintext.