Whilst poking around in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, making PreferPlainText equal “Yes”, I came across a property I don’t remember seeing before: “TornOffToolbarIsHidden”, set to Yes. Changing it to No and relaunching Mail doesn’t appear to change anything.
Googling “TornOffToolbarIsHidden” and “TornOffToolbar” don’t produce any hits. Has anybody seen this before?
I am envisioning nonexistent control palettes floating around.
It seems to refer to the visibility of the message window toolbar (open a mail in new window and you'll see …).
Aha! Gotcha! I think...
It must be related to the "NSToolbar Configuration TornOffViewer" property. Or "NSToolbar Configuration TornOffViewerTiger" if you're using Tiger.
You can view messages in two different ways. You can use the "preview" mode or you can double click on a message and view it in a window of its own. I use the latter mode, almost exclusively, dragging the dividing bar all the way down to allow me to see the maximum number of messages in my mailbox.
Messages viewed in this way have their own toolbar and this differs from the toolbar at the top of the main window. And also from the toolbar in a Compose window for that matter. Examining the details of the "NSToolbar Configuration TornOffViewerTiger" property shows that the icons (and their groupings) in my message toolbars correspond perfectly.
I'd love to find a setting I can tweak so that Safari/Mail respect my choice of Plain Text as a default for composing new messages. When I select "File > Mail Link to This Page" in Safari, I get a rich text message in Mail. Grrrr!!
(Also, this is my first post since you have gone over to the new system a few weeks back. I'm using 10.4.1 and Safari v2.0 (412). Clicking on the [Preview] button before posting pops up a small empty window. The Preview mechanism seems to be broken for me...)
... dragging the dividing bar all the way down ...
You can also double-click the bar to toggle its dividing/undividing position. Easier to do than describe.
Oh, and I have the same trouble with Preview here using Safari that you described.