Forcing Mail.app to show plain text messages

Forcing Mail.app to show plain text messages (and not show the rich text portion)

If you’ve ever wanted to stop looking at all the pretty rich text email messages and show only the plain text portion of an email, you can force your machine to do that.

First, though a little background. Inside of every rich text email message lies buried a plain text copy of the core contents of the message. If you mail client (usually Apple Mail or Microsoft Entourage) can show it (and these do) then it will prefer the html formatted message over the plain text. Its easy to force Mail or Entourage to send messages as plain text, but how do you get Mail to to receive messages that way? Read on…

To force incoming mail to display in plain text by default (which isn’t possible for all messages), you need to quit Mail, open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command: defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE. To switch to styled text (if available) when viewing a plain-text message, choose View -> Message -> Best Alternative.

via The seven most underused Mail features | Business Center | Working Mac | Macworld.