Color of text in outgoing email

[righthandman]

Does anyone know how the heck to change the default color (I mean so it's automatic) of the outgoing text in the Mail application? I can't believe there is no setting for this, that I can find anyway.

[ben schmidt]

Hi righthandman,

I don't know how to change the colour of text in outbound messages by default, but I came across a macosxhints.com discussion (details below) that might be helpful to you in your explorations.  There's also a good collection of mail.app plug-ins, etc. at this mail.app resource website:
http://www.timgaden.com/hawkwings/

all the best,
...ben

Details: 10.3: Use a local stylesheet to control Mail.app HTML
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040219094626558

The gist of this OS X 10.3 discussion seems to be that the author was able to create a local .css style sheet which overrode mail.app's default style sheet. 
Further discussion in the same thread observed that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the version 2.0.x mail.app that it introduced, subsequently broke the ability to get mail.app to use a local .css style sheet.

Someone then posted mixed success with directly editing (after making a backup!) the default system style sheet mail.app was using:
/System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/html4.css

I just tried editing my html4.css file as per the above discussion but unfortunately the text in a new mail.app message I then composed was not automatically displayed in the color I had specified in my html4.css file. Of course, I'm running OS X 10.4.3/Mail.app 2.0.5, so maybe mail.app's behaviour has changed since this thread was last updated. Also, all I did was append the following 6 lines to the end of my html4.css file. They were based on the discussion, but perhaps I didn't follow it closely enough.
font[size="1"] {color: blue;}
font[size="2"] {color: blue;}
font[size="3"] {color: blue;}
font[size="4"] {color: blue;}
font[size="5"] {color: blue;}
font[size="6"] {color: blue;}