Please restore monospaced display for plain-text messagesAqua Mail used to have a very useful message-view option:
Message View → View → Enable mono fontThis was not a global font setting. Its behavior was specifically:
- Messages sent as text/plain were displayed in a monospaced/fixed-width font.
- Whitespace was preserved so columns, indentation, and tables remained aligned.
- HTML/rich-text messages continued to display normally using proportional fonts and their normal formatting.
That distinction is important.
A large amount of computer-generated email is intentionally sent as
text/plain: cron output, Unix/Linux logs, monitoring reports, backup reports, diagnostic output, command output, firewall reports, database reports, etc.
These messages often use spaces and fixed character widths to convey structure. For example:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 220G 147G 62G 71% /
/dev/sdb1 932G 521G 364G 59% /backupor:
RANK RULE NAME COUNT %SPAM %HAM
1 BAYES_99 165 75.0 0.2
2 DKIM_VALID 438 62.1 81.4
3 SPF_PASS 401 55.3 77.8With a proportional font, columns that were deliberately aligned by the sender no longer line up. The text remains technically readable, but important visual structure is lost, making reports and logs substantially harder to scan and interpret.
This behavior was intentional in older Aqua Mail versions.
In the 2014 General Discussion thread:
Topic 2665 — "Option to display simple text messages using typewriter font?"Kostya specifically described the intended use case as computer-generated information such as cron logs, reports and tables.
He wrote:
Monospaced font is mostly useful for viewing computer generated text, like cron job, reports, that type of thing.
and later:
The primary use case for mono font is for viewing computer generated information (logs, etc.), often with tables or indentation that assume fixed character widths.
The option was still present in Aqua Mail 1.6.1.5 in May 2016.
See General Discussion:
Topic 4660 — "Mail with xml content / Aquamail Pro 1.6.1.5"That thread gives the exact menu path as:
Message view → overflow menu → View → Enable mono fontIt also confirms that the option applied specifically to messages sent as
Content-Type: text/plain, without changing normal HTML/rich-text messages.
At some point later this option disappeared, apparently during or after the Message View redesign.
Could this behavior please be restored?The desired behavior is simply the old Aqua Mail behavior:
text/plain → optional monospaced/fixed-width displaytext/html → normal proportional/HTML renderingA setting such as:
Use monospaced font for plain-text messageswould be sufficient.
It should
not force all mail into a monospaced font, and it should
not alter HTML messages.
For users who receive system-generated reports and logs by email, this is not primarily an aesthetic font preference. Fixed-width rendering preserves information that the sender encoded using character position and whitespace.
Restoring the former behavior would make Aqua Mail substantially more useful for technical and system-generated email.
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And I would *love* a Windows version ... 👍👍👍