How do you specify a minimum font size for incoming mail?

Question

Is there a way to specify a minimum font size for incoming mail messages? Mail I get from others is almost unreadable and I always have to manually (apple +) increase the size.
As a test, a friend on a PC (most mail I get comes from Windows) kept increasing the size he sent me, but when I received it there was no change in size on my end.
I can't find anything in Mail's menus and preferences to change this behavior.
Mail 2.07; OS 10.4.6.
Thanks,
Cathy

Answer 1

if i had the problem then i'd make a backup copy of
my ~/library/preferences/com.appple.mail.plist file,
open the original in property list editor, look for
any likely elements that have small or negative font
sizes and set them to, say, 12, save the changes and
see if that helped
Found the file; couldn't open it (tried Text Edit?) to make any changes.
You can use the following trick to force Mail to
always use a larger minimum font size on received
messages - some HTML messages might not look exactly
as intended but at least you can now read them:
1. Quit Mail
2. Open the Terminal
(/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type in the
following:
defaults write com.apple.mail
MinimumHTMLFontSize 13
3. Restart Mail.app and your HTML messages are
readable.
Of course you can set the point size to whatever you
like.
Found file; was not comfortable inputing text as this simple task did not behave properly.
PC friend said other Mac user reported this same anomally with receiving small text from him. I have over a dozen different PC users that I correspond with where I have this problem. It seems to be on the Mac end.
-Cathy