Gmail – Can you make Gmail show plain text only messages in fixed-width font

gmail

Is it possible to make Gmail display messages with only text/plain content using a constant width font? To clarify, I'd still prefer multipart/alternative messages with an HTML part to be shown in HTML mode. (In other words, just like Thunderbird does it.)

I receive some plain text messages with table-like formatting, which obviously depends on constant-width font. Gmail breaks the formatting like this:

alt text

I would want something like this, of course:

alt text

(Showing messages matching a certain filter (or tagged with certain label) in fixed width would be an equally good solution here, so if that's possible, please let me know!)

I looked around Gmail settings, but couldn't easily find anything related. The "Show original" option is a work-around, but it's rather clumsy if you always have to do that.

This is a repost of an old (unresolved) Super User question (Google cache). I would have rather migrated it to Webapps, but that's not possible as it seems delete-happy SU moderators have recently removed it altogether for some reason.

Best Answer

Update 2019-07-15:

The gmail-fixed-font extension is now hosted on github: https://github.com/jparise/gmail-fixed-font

The instructions are provided in the repo README, but to summarise (assuming you are using Chrome):

  1. Download the script
  2. Open a new tab and navigate to chrome://extensions/
  3. Enable Developer Mode
  4. Drag and drop the script onto the window and install
  5. (optional) you may want to allow the extension only for the gmail domain by clicking Details > Site Access: On specific sites and enter https://mail.google.com in the dialogue box and save

Ok, you have to try Gmail Fixed Font userscript

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Gmail Fixed Font
// @namespace      http://www.indelible.org/
// @description    Fixed-font message bodies for Gmail
// @author         Jon Parise, James Tunnicliffe
// @version        1.3
// @include        http://mail.google.com/*
// @include        https://mail.google.com/*
// @include        http://*.mail.google.com/*
// @include        https://*.mail.google.com/*
// @grant          GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==

// Plain-text Message Body
var css = ".ii, .Ak { font: medium monospace !important; }";
// Compose Interface
css += ".editable { font: medium monospace !important; }";

if (typeof GM_addStyle != "undefined") {
    GM_addStyle(css);
} else if (typeof addStyle != "undefined") {
    addStyle(css);
} else {
    var heads = document.getElementsByTagName("head");
    if (heads.length > 0) {
        var node = document.createElement("style");
        node.type = "text/css";
        node.appendChild(document.createTextNode(css));
        heads[0].appendChild(node);
    }
}
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