How to change the background and text colour for messages in Mail.app

There are several ways to do that.

The easiest way would be to install a Plugin which formats outgoing E-Mail and give you the option to change specific characteristics to you liking (Font, Size etc.). For that you should look into the following Plugins:

1. MessageFont

   "WYSIWYG for your outgoing emails If Outlook for Mac, Thunderbird and other email apps can set the default composition font1, why can’t Apple Mail? With MessageFont, you can! MessageFont lets you set Apple Mail’s default composition font for new rich text outgoing messages. [...]"

2. Universal Mailer

   "Universal Mailer is a Mail.app plugin that solves some issues when sending emails. It removes ATT00001.htm files, it correctly formats messages with attachments and inline images and offers an option to set the default font for outgoing messages. [...]"

Another way would be to change the default Font Size via the Terminal, f.e. in 24, open up the Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 24

That will change the Font to 24pt, but that includes the Page you want to forward from Safari if you choose 'Webpage'. If you just forward the Link everything should be fine.

You may try a workaround: users with high email count can configure their Google Apps accounts not to sync more than 1000 emails per label (or folder).

Each user will have to:

• Go to their Gmail interface
• Go to Settings (by clicking on the gear in the upper-right hand side of the page)
• Select the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab
• Look for "Folder Size Limit "and check "Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages" and select 1000 (or another number that seems appropriate)