Welcome to the Power Users community on Codidact!
Power Users is a Q&A site for questions about the usage of computer software and hardware. We are still a small site and would like to grow, so please consider joining our community. We are looking forward to your questions and answers; they are the building blocks of a repository of knowledge we are building together.
How do I enlarge inbox text in Thunderbird?
I've just installed Thunderbird on MacOS 14.2.1. I've run through all the settings I could find related to fonts and sizes, but nothing I change affects the message list, meaning the list of sender/subject/date that you see in the inbox. Some (but not all) individual messages respond to font changes (a problem for a different question later), but I need to make the text in the main list bigger. Is there a way to do this?
I'm referring to this part of the UI:
I restarted Thunderbird after making settings changes (several times, by now), but that didn't change the appearance of the message list.
1 answer
The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Monica Cellio | (no comment) | Aug 15, 2025 at 14:16 |
There are options to increase/decrease the font size directly in the view menu. They affect everything, including the message list and they are applied instantly, no restart required.
But they affect everything equally, which may not be what you want.
To only change the message list, you can do the following:
- Open Help -> Troubleshooting Information
- Click on Open Directory next to Profile Directory. This should open your file manager with the proper directory
- Close Thunderbird
- Create a new folder named
chromeinside your profile directory - Inside the
chromefolder, create a new file nameduserChrome.css
In this file you can override the CSS that makes up the UI of the program (generally called Chrome, which has nothing to do with the browser, except that's where the browser got its name from).
Example:
#threadTree > treechildren {
font-size: 14pt !important;
}
#folderTree > treechildren {
font-size: 14pt !important;
}
The !important flag will make sure it gets priority over the existing CSS rules.
You will need to restart Thunderbird to have changes to this file applied.
1 comment thread
1 comment thread