Ubuntu – How to make fonts in Thunderbird look bigger

After some searching on the net, I found the solution to my own problem. I include a description of it below to hopefully save others with the same problem some effort:

At the top of the dialog window under Edit > Preferences > Display > Formatting > Fonts > Advanced, there is a drop-down menu labelled Fonts for. This is initially set to Western, meaning all settings below only applies to messages with those encodings. To change fonts for messages with utf-8 and other non-western encodings, choose Other Languages in the drop-down menu then set the font types and sizes to the same as you have for Western.

This is fairly easy to do with Thunderbird 14.0, using the SmartTemplate and ReFwdFormatter extensions.

1. Install SmartTemplate and ReFwdFormatter

• Start Thunderbird, go to Tools...Add-ons

• Search for smarttemplate and install:

  

• Search for refwd and install:

  

• Restart Thunderbird to activate the extensions.

2. Configure ReFwdFormatter to remove the quote vertical bar

• Go to Tools...Add-ons and select the Extensions option in the left sidebar.

• Click on the Preferences button for ReFwdFormatter:

  

• Make sure all the choices you need are selected, and close.

3. Configure SmartTemplate to reply like Outlook

• Go to Tools...Add-ons and select the Extensions option in the left sidebar.
• Click on the Preferences button for SmartTemplate

• In the "SmartTemplate Settings" window, click on the Reply tab:

  

• Set up the checkboxes as above, and paste this basic Outlook reply template in the text box:

  <br>
  <hr>
  <b>From:</b> %from%
  <b>Sent:</b> %X:=sent% %A%, %B% %d%, %Y% %l%:%M%%p(3)%
  [[<b>To:</b> %to%]][[<br><b>Cc:</b> %cc%]]
  <b>Subject:</b> %subject%
  <br>
  

• To see what the fields mean and a list of all available fields, click on the Help button to expand the window with this useful section (or see list on website):

  

• You should also paste the same template in the Forward tab, with the same settings.

4. Demo:

5. Further customization

• This requires minimal knowledge of HTML. If you need specific help, please post in the comments below.

Specific customizations for karthick87

• Makes horizontal line blue
• Makes header font size smaller
• Gray highlight/background for headers
• Date/time in Outlook format
• Only email names displayed in headers, with clickable mailto: links and a tooltip displaying the email address on mouse hover

<br>
<hr style="color:#62B3FF">
<div style="background-color: #DDDDDD; font-size:10pt"><b>From:</b> <a title="%from(mail)%" href="mailto:%from(mail)%">%from(name)%</a>
<b>Sent:</b> %X:=sent% %A%, %B% %d%, %Y% %l%:%M%%p(3)%
[[<b>To:</b> <a title="%to(mail)%" href="mailto:%to(mail)%">%to(name)%</a>]][[<br><b>Cc:</b> <a title="%cc(mail)%" href="mailto:%cc(mail)%">%cc(name)%</a>]]
<b>Subject:</b> %subject%</div>
<br>