#2171 new
Mike Conley

Feature Request: Background and text colour support in composer

Reported by Mike Conley | November 10th, 2018 @ 07:31 PM

I often find straight black text on a white background a bit difficult to stare at for any length of time. It would be nice if MM supported colour schemes that would allow specification of the text and background colours.

Note that the Fonts window already does this (possibly not for all fonts, but I'm not certain about that): there are buttons in the dialog window's toolbar area that allow one to choose a text colour and a background colour. If MM were to respect those values in addition to the font selection, that would be fine.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny November 20th, 2018 @ 01:42 PM

    It is possible to change defaults using a custom theme, but it's tricky to make this work for HTML emails (which might be most of what you receive if you do not use the Prefer Plain Text setting). It is somewhat similar to the problems I have to deal with to make dark mode work for more than just plain text emails...

    I'll keep this request in mind when working on dark mode, but I'm not making any promises.

  • Mike Conley

    Mike Conley November 20th, 2018 @ 01:46 PM

    I always have Prefer Plain Text set and only rarely view HTML mail. I would be perfectly happy if I could just set the background colour of the Composer and Viewer window for plain text only, and let HTML do what it wants.

  • benny

    benny November 23rd, 2018 @ 09:11 AM

    • State changed from “new” to “closed”

    You can put this:

    body {  
       background-color: #EEEEEE;
    }
    

    into a file created here:

    ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Resources/MmMessagesWebView/stylesheet.css
    

    The composer text field is a bit trickier. You need to read up on this and then replace the display.plist file with something setting the background color to, for example, #EEEEEE. (Similar to the above, but you need a copy of the original .plist file.)

    None of this is guaranteed to work forever (hopefully it'll eventually be easier to customize).

  • Mike Conley

    Mike Conley November 23rd, 2018 @ 04:58 PM

    That works quite nicely for now. Cheers.

  • Terence Gillespie

    Terence Gillespie November 23rd, 2018 @ 08:01 PM

    Glad to see this solution here but it didn't work for me.

    1. Had to create the Resources folder and also the MmMessagesWebView folders as they did not exist yet.
    2. Contents of the stylesheet.css were as specified (with nothing before or after them):

      body {
      background-color: #EEEEEE; }

    3. Restarted MailMate several times but still no #EEEEEE for background preview.

    Has anyone else had similar experience?

    Thank you,

    Terence

  • benny

    benny December 11th, 2018 @ 01:28 PM

    @Terence: To make sure you got it right, try this:

    cat ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/Resources/MmMessagesWebView/stylesheet.css
    

    Also, note that this only applies to plain text emails, that is, it's mainly useful for “Prefer Plain Text” users.

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