Not a big of the yellow background in Apple's Mail.app Notes? Handy with a text editor? You can change the background with a few simple steps. First, make a backup of your Mail application in case something goes wrong.
With the backup in place, Control-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, then navigate into the Resources folder. Using BBEdit (or another plain text editor), open the following three files: note-view.html, note-window.html, and note.css.
In the two .html files, locate the img tag that references note-background-gradient, and delete the entire line (or comment it out with the <!-- --> tag pair). In the .css file, change the background:rgb values to something pleasing; I used 250, 250, 245 so it would look nice with the rest of the Mail motif.
Save the edited files and launch Mail, and enjoy your non-yellow Notes.
[robg adds: Note that this edit will break code signing on Mail (in 10.5 and 10.6); you can check this yourself in Terminal with the modified app:
With the backup in place, Control-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, then navigate into the Resources folder. Using BBEdit (or another plain text editor), open the following three files: note-view.html, note-window.html, and note.css.
In the two .html files, locate the img tag that references note-background-gradient, and delete the entire line (or comment it out with the <!-- --> tag pair). In the .css file, change the background:rgb values to something pleasing; I used 250, 250, 245 so it would look nice with the rest of the Mail motif.
Save the edited files and launch Mail, and enjoy your non-yellow Notes.
[robg adds: Note that this edit will break code signing on Mail (in 10.5 and 10.6); you can check this yourself in Terminal with the modified app:
$ codesign -v /Applications/Mail.app /Applications/Mail copy.app: a sealed resource is missing or invalidHowever, I'm not sure what impact this may have, at least in 10.5. I tested this hint and then used my modified Mail app to check and send email without any troubles. I'd suggest, however, making the changes on a duplicate version of Mail and leaving the original untouched. Run the modified duplicate instead of the original, and then you can easily switch back if you have any problems.]
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