Reducing font size on the email read screen

How do I change the default font size when I read email on the screen? Each time I open an email to read, I have to press ‘Control -’ several times to zoom out and reduce the size of the font enough that I can read most of the message.

Hi, you can set lower text in Tools - Settings - Mail - Read under preferred style, but it will work only for plain text emails.
You can also check in same place “Read all messages in plain text” that should help you with HTML emails to be affected by this setting too.

Jan

There are reasons for viewing in HTML but it’s too bad we cannot override the font size as a default for ALL HTML emails without having to press Ctrl++ several times on EACH one. It would be so very helpful to have the capability to override the CSS with our own (and if I had the capability, I would undoubtedly override font color and background color too while I was at it, but for me, size is the most important).

You can use HTML to customise your emails, or use templates to define the default font-size for your emails. You can insert HTML by right clicking the editing area and selecting Import > HTML from the dropdown.

Please note however that HTML messages need to follow certain formatting rules in order to display correctly on all email clients.

Regards,

Are you talking about the emails you are writing?  Sorry if I did not make myself clear. I was talking about incoming emails I was reading.  (Obviously, even if you could, doing it on each incoming email one-by-one would be more cumbersome than Ctrl++. I’m looking for a way to apply my font size and perhaps other styling to others’ emails en masse so that I can spend less time resizing - or struggling to read - incoming email.)

When you receive an HTML formatted email, the values of your font-size, the picture size or the canvas size of your email is pre-set by the HTML and CSS formatting included in the message itself, it is not possible to setup the value to a selected number as the messages would appear corrupt in some cases.

Regards,

Point well taken. In the ideal world, if it were overridden, a clickable option would appear (probably in the same area that “download pictures” does currently) allowing the user to see the HTML as formatted by sender.

Alternatively, could the program check the font size, and if it is below a certain size set by the user, to automatically do the same thing that the user would do by typing Ctrl++ some number of times to get the font up to the user’s preferred minimum? After all, that’s what the user will end up doing himself in order to read the tiny font, so why not automate it so the user won’t have to do it manually?

Alternative 2: Allow the user to set a percentage enlargement automatically on  all  incoming emails (giving the same effect as Ctrl++ some number of times). Some of them will then be too big, necessitating horizontal scrolling, but judging from the company emails I get, most would not. What I see most commonly are HTML emails that have half the screen wasted because they are designed for screens with lower resolutions than mine and that are not widescreens. Thus, I would prefer all of them to be bigger (and so would my 74-year-old friend, who would therefore rather stick with Thunderbird except for the fact that Thunderbird files keep going corrupt under the volume of emails he receives).

The zoom feature is a different feature than improving the font-size, this is unfortunately not possible. As I suggested the HTML formatting describes the display of the email, we can’t override this, you can zoom in, if some of the items are too small. It is not possible to auto-adjust HTML emails.

Regards,

Sorry, I was making a program change recommendation. I already understood it is not possible as the program is currently written.

Thanks for all your responses.

(If the emails can be shown on the screen, the program already “knows” what font size to display them in, and thus could  theoretically  make adjustments based on that. The questions are then how much it would cost in development, programming and testing to make such enhancements, and whether or not such enhancements would ultimately benefit both users and the company. Given that my 74-year-old friend was ready, based on the tiny font size alone, to pay for Outlook until I told him what I don’t like about that  program - and we got disgusted with Microsoft’s website when we tried looking for a trial desktop version of Outlook - eM Client may be losing customers just because people either don’t know they can enlarge the text or because they are tired of doing it for most or every email. If you cannot read your emails, there isn’t much point to having an email program.)

Thank you for your suggestion, we’re currently working on upcoming release of eM clientt 7 which will feature a re-desgined application interface as well as the back-end of the application including new application core running on Chromium (WebKit), this will allow us to handle a lot of things differently hopefully allowing us to improve what you’re suggesting in future releases as well.

Regards,