Displaying plain text by default in mail.app

By Ricky Buchanan • August 18, 2007

Most email you receive probably appears in fancy fonts with colours and backgrounds (it's HTML, just like a web page) and this can be hard to read. If you use the Mail.app for your email you can press Command-Option-P, or select View->Message->Plain Text Alternativefrom the menu bar, and if the email has a plain text version available it will display that version. If you want the fancy version back, press Command-Option-H, or select View->Message->Best Alternative from the menu bar.

Most HTML email does have a plain text version, in my experience the only ones without are spam and some newsletters. You can configure this text version to display by default with the following steps:

Quit the Mail.app program if it's running. Open Terminal.app, in the /Applications/Utilities folder, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

Now you can start Mail again, and messages that have a plain text version will display that by default. If you want to see the fancy HTML version of an email, you can still use the Command-Option-H or View->Message->Best Alternative commands.

To set the default back to seeing the HTML version, use the same instructions as above, but change the line to:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool FALSE

- ATMac

Categories: Information, Neurologically Impaired, Users, Vision Impaired, VoiceOver
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About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 34 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websites she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

2 Comments For “Displaying plain text by default in mail.app”

Matt Mar 10th, 2009 at 8:54 am

Beautiful. I’d forgotten that I ran a Terminal command to view text-only, and I was going koo koo trying to get back to default.

Thanks Ricky!
deckchairs (Deckchairs) Mar 16th, 2009 at 8:24 pm

Displaying plain text by default in Apple’s mail.app http://is.gd/fajk A great post for anyone learning about accessibility and email.

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