is it possble to change the font of incoming emails?

Presumably though, if you changed the font of ALL incoming mail that'd change the quoted sections in the replies? So you wouldn't be able to distinguish what you'd written anyway?

i should rephrase... is it possible to change the font of each emailer on arrival... to help distinguish people?

No, that's not possible.

how odd, apple dictionary doesn't recognise the word 'distinguish'...

???

You can easily set the colour of the message by applying rules per person (Preferences --> Rules), to change the font however isn't directly an option but you could run an Applescript which might be able to do it.

Regards,

Shawn

But that will change the color of the whole message. I think that what Paul is looking for is a way to change the appearance of quoted text within a message, to better distinguish who said what. I could be wrong about that interpretation, though.

Oops, yes - my Bad...

Possibly AppleScript then, not that I expect that to be that easy!

Regards,

Shawn

Some people I frequently exchange emails with do that by always choosing a color for their outgoing text. Since I normally never do that, her (just to pick one example) email text is always a kind of dark lavender color. My responses are always plain ol' black. So as the email goes back and forth, it's very easy to tell the response start and stop points apart.

So in that vein, you could assign any text you write a color. Then when you get a response, it will stand out from the other person's response, assuming they don't pick up the same color you used.

It must be HTML. Plain text can't have any font, font size, font color, etc changes made to it. It's just a string of characters, with display left entirely to the client viewing it.

That means, of course, that Kurt's trick won't always work. It'll work if you're corresponding only with people using Mail, or other mail clients that support HTML mail. But Outlook, for example, is notoriously bad at HTML e-mail. Using HTML mail might cause an Outlook recipient problems. Also, if anyone always sends plain text mail only (as I do), all your font styling will be lost in anything they quote in their reply.

Thomas' note is correct. Text color will be retained only if the message remains as HTML. Some other folks I normally correspond with always change their outgoing email to plain text. So then the entire message becomes one font in black.

But you'll still suffer the same problem. The only way to maintain font styling within heavily nested quoted material within one single e-mail message is for all the e-mail styling to remain intact for the entire conversation. It would be difficult to reliably parse the text and change the font styles if they were lost, and that's assuming that you can use AppleScript to make changes to received e-mail messages, which I don't think is the case.

You'd be better off to simply not include so much quoted material in single e-mail messages and to set mail to organize by conversations (in the View menu) and always include related messages (in Mail -> Preferences -> Viewing).

im wondering if there is "an app for that"