Mail - OSX Lion - Can't change font in mail list

alessioT wrote:

I still do not have a broadband connection at my place, and I don't like the idea to download ~1Gb with the 3G on my iphone that I am using as an hotspot to be online right now 😉

That's a pretty good reason.

Me neither acutally, I was just suggesting that since I did not find this string...and I also opened the .plist file with textwrangler.

Well, just for kicks, I went into my Time Machine backups and grabbed my old com.apple.mail.plist file (from when 10.7.2 was installed) and did find the RichMessageList string there. So maybe try the search again? Could be better to just search for "RichMessageList". It's about 1/5 the way down from the beginning.

I found out!

I don't know why, the cmd+F search did not find it...and my eyes did not do a good job 🙂 The second try was better...thanks a lot!

Wow, the fact that you can't change the font size is an incredibly backward and asinine situation. It makes having a large screen monitor a waste of money.

Whatever you do, don't use Tinkertool to try to get around this absurd limitation. I have spent the past 2 hours playing with every possible configuration to get the fonts to a size where I can actually read them, and voila! Safari no longer works. Neither does iTunes. Or iCal, or mail, or anything that requires an Internet connection (now that's brilliant)! I can verify my Mac is connected to my router, and every other device works just fine through birth wired and wifi connections. It's only my Mac and only since I changed the fonts (I haven't changed anything else with Tinkertool).

I am simply dumbfounded at Apple's inability to let users change something so mundane as a font size. Unbelievable.

Foovius Foo wrote:

Open ~Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Search for:

<key>RichMessageList</key>

Change the true value to false

Save the .plist file and re-launch Mail

The list will have returned to the "classic" layout (and will now show the fonts in the size you want), while keeping the rest of the app in the new layout.

The down side is that you'll lose the multi-line preview, but you can make the thing readable this way.

Foovius Foo, THANK YOU! This classic message list layout combined with the side-by-side panes makes mail in Lion usable again. I don't ask much of my mail program, but it must be able to display message lists in a table format so that I can quickly scan and sort them.

In case anyone else wonders how to make the above changes to the .plist file under Lion without installing the XCode developer tools, see http://sveinbjorn.org/install_property_list_editor_app_on_mac_os_x_lion. This worked fine for me.

Finally, if you have the Property List Editor installed but then wonder how to open the ~Library/Preferences folder, which is unlisted by default in Lion: Go to your home folder, press Shift-Command-G and type in "Library/Preferences". I wasn't able to search for the key, but keys are listed in alphabetical order.

Again, THANK YOU for posting this solution, Foovius Foo!

Foovius Foo, THANK YOU! This classic message list layout combined with the side-by-side panes makes mail in Lion usable again. I don't ask much of my mail program, but it must be able to display message lists in a table format so that I can quickly scan and sort them.

I'm very happy with this modification as well.

It does require a bit more horizontal space to be useful, but once you tweak the columns a bit, it's the best of both worlds -- you have a legible mail list with lots of info, and you have a nice vertical preview pane. Even works on my 11" Air screen.

It also helps to drag your most-used mailboxes to the toolbar area up top, and use "command+shift+M" to hide the list of mailboxes when you don't need it.

If you are familiar with Termial.app, you can use the following to try the

Foovius Foo's great solution:

Quit Mail.app, type the following command in Terminal.app, and restart Mai.app

defaults write com.apple.mail RichMessageList -bool FALSE

replace FALSE with TRUE if you want to go back to the new list (with preview).

Just confirmed: this works in Mountain Lion as well. It's unfortunate that it *has* to (in other words, they didn't fix Mail ignoring the user's font choice in the three-column view). But at least it does work.

I found that if you toggle "use classic view" on, then off again, you'll lose the fix and Mail will go back to using the wrong fonts again. A quick trip back to Terminal and it's fixed again.

foovius, this is AMAZING

Just found that the following works as posted above:

defaults write com.apple.mail RichMessageList -bool FALSE

All you need to do is go back to Mail preferences, then click on Viewing and toggle on and off the option to 'Use Classic Layout' and it will retain the ability to change the default font size while also retaining the nicer multi-line preview.

From what I can tell, that just does what was said earlier — your two choices are still either single-line preview that respects your font choice (in my case, Lucida Grande); or the multi-line preview in Helvetica only. Did you really get a multi-line preview with a font other than Helvetica?

Thanks to Jun T. for his great snippet of terminal code to use. Worked like a charm for me.

defaults write com.apple.mail RichMessageList -bool FALSE

Then I changed my font to what I wanted. After setting that, I quit mail and went back to terminal and entered

defaults write com.apple.mail RichMessageList -bool TRUE

Seemed to stick and do the trick. I hope it stays this way!

Hi Foovius Foo - thank you! You really helped me to work with Mail in Lion and ML! I have now updated to Mavericks - and I am stuck again with with the silly "new" Mail layout.

~Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist is now at

/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

But changing <key>RichMessageList</key> to false ist not working anymore. Do you have any ideas? This layout is driving me nuts...

Thanks a lot in advance!

Thank you, Foovius Foo. This worked for me as well. While I would like to try the new Message List, it is just too small to read - I sent feedback, too.

It's really not user-friendly. Most mail clients do provide a way to increase these fonts.

I have the same issue. I can't change the font size in Mail. It's supper annoying. I guess I will switch to Thuderbird!

Not sure if anyone here is still having this problem with El Cap, but I've had it and just resolved it more easily than I thought I might be able to. In "non-classic" layout, the Message list font box was greyed out, but the other two were OK and I could change the font size. I noticed from earlier posts here that other people had been able to change the Message list font size in classic layout, so I switched to that and changed the size of the Message list font, (Incidentally using the slider on the right hand side enables you to choose font sized between those listed in the column.) I then switched back to "non-classic" layout and the new Message list font size was preserved. Closed Mail and opened it again and the new fonts were still preserved. So that's fixed it for me.