'Fonts & Colors' not showing under Settings in mac Mail

the other weird thing is the the whole 'box' (ie guess it's the General tab) extends off to infinity - to the right...

That may be why you don’t see the buttons. They are centered on the window. They must be half-way to infinity.

Only thing I can think of is start up in Safe Mode. That will clear some system caches.

AFelderhof wrote:

I'm not impressed at the way Apple seems to turn it around to be your problem...

Is it not? Logically, don’t you think someone would have noticed this problem by now?

it turns out that Apple know about this - the tech admitted, without actually saying so, that it's pretty much a 'known issue' (on their internal websites) for the M2 chip on the Macbook Air ..

Nah. That’s just part of the script to try to make the customer happy.

I guess my problem is that this is still ongoing and Apple has made me feel it's somehow my problem...

It is. That’s the problem with any kind of end user experience of any kind. As long as you go with the flow, accept the defaults, stay in the automated system, everything should work as it should. But if you fall out of that path, for whatever reason, it will be your responsibility to right the ship. I agree that it shouldn’t be that way. But that is the way it is.

I've now upgraded OS to 15.3

Totally irrelevant, if not harmful. I realize that is the most common, and most recommended approach. But except for a true handful of cases, it’s a very bad idea to make any kind of change when you’re experiencing a problem like this. Again, I totally understand that people don’t understand this, and think that, yes, indeed, this is one of those cases. They are wrong. They are always wrong.

have to send a new Capture Data dmg file through - which have tried 3-4 times and haven't managed to upload yet (Australia has poor wifi) so guess will use my mobile data...

Don’t worry about it. It’s a waste of your time. No one will ever look at it.

However the problem I actually have is Apple's attitude to the customer - I'm a pretty loyal customer

Apple has over a billion customers. The loyalty of any one, or 100,000 is irrelevant. In the world of consumer products, those 1% outliers constitute the vast majority of support costs. The best thing to do is be polite and hope they go away.

I've bought 2x iMacs (including the beautiful 27' one) a Mac Pro, at least two Macbook Pro's, 3x Macbook Airs (including the 15" M2) a Homepod, a couple of iPads and a number of iPhones);

Again, I totally get it. You’re appealing to your loyalty, your value as a customer, but it just doesn’t matter. You’re way off base. Apple is a global, faceless, emotionless corporation. These kinds of emotional appeals will only make you more upset and frustrated. Don’t go there.

I sent an email through asking that it be escalated as a formal customer service complaint, that I had spent at least 10 - 12 hours (so far) and asking could someone get back to me and discuss , but no-one has even bothered to respond.

No one here can do anything about Apple support. As much as sending those sysdiagnose reports to Apple is a waste of time, complaining about Apple’s response to us is equally futile. What do you want us to do? Try to top your story with our own Apple Support stories that are even worse? I bet we could do it. 😄

Pretty much the only thing we can do for you is solve the problem. But you’ll have to meet us halfway. That means forgetting about anything you did with Apple Support or anything they said. We weren’t there. We don’t know what they did or didn’t do. We might ask you to do the same thing they did.

AFelderhof wrote: someone finally said, why do you send emails in such a small font, and when I thought about it (& tried to do something about it) it wouldn't let me set the default from 12 pt to anything else.

Actually the Fonts and Colors settings have nothing to do with the size of font that your recipients will see, only what you yourself will see. What do you have set in the New Message pane for font and size, and can you change that?

AFelderhof wrote:

yes helvetica 12 pt, and I can change that but obviously the point is, I don't want to have to change that everytime a do a new mail... hence wanting to change the default

Please go to your Sent folder and select one of the outgoing messages and then do View / Message / Raw Source and examine the html codes of the body text. Do you see anything there that stipulates 12pt font size?

Mail doesn’t let you set a default size to be seen by the recipient, only for what you see locally.

Changing the default font will not change the message font. It will send as plain text unless you change the font in the message, every time. The default in the settings is just what you see, not what you send. I didn’t think that was what you intended, but if it was, that’s what you have to do. There is a workaround to that, also.

The only reason I know about that issue is because someone a long time ago had a similar problem. It had to do with a different language not auto-fitting correctly. You might try changing the input source in System Settings > Keyboard, Launch Mail, check, then change it back. Quit Mail and relaunch to see what happens.

AFelderhof wrote:

Ok thanks Tom, this is the only reference that seems to show some sort of figure is this ... (if anything an 8)

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset=utf-8

Yes, that's the encoding, no connection to font size.

So if you do not see any signal in your View > Message > Raw Source about 12pt or some other font size, it means it is up to your recipients to make the font bigger at their end with their own mail app. You are not exercising any control over what they see. Apple Mail is designed that way -- unless you take special action, it is the recipient who gets to choose the size and name of the font with which they read your email.

Customize toolbars on Mac

Predicated on placement of this question, macOS 14 Sonoma

Mail >> Setting >> Fonts and Colours

What you have presented in above is the " General Tab "

You what the " Fonts and Colours Tab "