How to Force All Mail in Mac OS X to be Displayed as Plain Text

A Rich Text Email Being Force Read as Plain Text

Plain text email may not be as feature-rich, but reading only plain text email keeps your Mac safer from potential virus infections and malicious scripts. It’s less resource hungry than rich-text email. In this lesson you will learn how to force all of your incoming email to be displayed in plain text.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Mac OS X Leopard
• Terminal application

1. Mac OS X Terminal Application

   Find your Terminal application (located in your Applications/Utilities directory) and double click to launch it.

2. Enter the Command into Your Terminal application

   In your Terminal application enter the following command:defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

3. To see the changes, you will need to quit and relaunch your Mail application.

4. To undo the plain text default in Mail, type in the following command into the Terminal application:defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool FALSE