Who was the fool who decided that e-mail would be best sent using fancy “stationery”? I’m talking fonts, colored backgrounds, winky-bouncy-bubble heads — all that junk. While it may thrill you, it’s annoying readers like Bea, who finds the text sent to her in e-mail messages too tiny to print.

I’m a plain text e-mail guy from years back. I compose all my e-mail in plain text. After all, under the hood, all e-mail is plain text. When you junk up your e-mail with fancy formatting, you’re still sending plain text, but that text is formatted like a web page.

Some e-mail programs strip out all the junk, removing fancy fonts, pretty colors, and text sizes. Eudora does that. The end result is that you receive an e-mail message that looks like plain text, in a font and size you can determine on your computer, not something the sender sets up.

Bea’s question was this:

I was wondering why no books cover,”printing printing e-mail or if does print it is too small to read.

My books do cover a solution, just not one specific to tiny text. The solution is to try and get the text from the e-mail message and to the printer somehow removing the font attributes between those two locations. Here’s one way to accomplish that:

1. Select all the text from the e-mail message.
2. Press Ctrl+C to copy that text.
3. Open a new, blank word processing document.
4. Press Ctrl+V to paste your e-mail message text.
5. Reformat the text. Change the font size to something larger. In Word, you can press Ctrl+A then Ctrl+Spacebar to reformat the entire document to the Normal style, which is readable and printable.
6. Print the document: Ctrl+P.

After reformatting, the document prints just fine.

Of course, the bottom line is that tiny text in an e-mail message is not a problem based on something you did. It’s the way the person sending the message formatted things. When I receive such a message, I reply to the sender and ask them if they can send me plain text e-mail messages. Most often, they reply. They’re usually surprised that their text formatting doesn’t read well. And they’re thankful that I let them know how their messages were coming across.

After they change, often they write back that others have told them that the text was a problem but, because few people understand computers, the other recipients didn’t know whether it was their problem or not. Now you know.