Apple Mail: font sizes smaller than point settings suggest

Using Mail.app, I've noticed that the same font/size setting -- say, 11-point Calibri -- appears smaller while working with it in Mail as opposed to anywhere else. Pretty irritating.

I'm aware that Mail has some long-standing issues with fonts, ranging from not being correctly encoded into messages (resulting in hideously huge Times New Roman messages in Outlook) to rendering as itty-bitty as possible in Mail (hence the "defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize __" tip). But why is it that even when selecting fonts, the examples given are smaller than the point size suggests? Makes no sense.

Entourage is entirely too sluggish for my liking, and no offense to its fans, but its appearance reminds me of something Fischer-Price might design for My First Email Client™.

 

Bumping my own thread after having found many, many conversations on other forums about this same stupid issue.

Here's what we have:

Preferences > "Fonts and Colors" settings do not apply to the HTML code carried on a message. So even if I specify message font as, say, 12-point Calibri, there will be no such designation in the message as it appears when sent.

Preferences > "Composing" is indeed set to use rich text.

And perhaps worst of all, messages sent as default formatting sometimes appear in Outlook on other machines with HUGE Times New Roman font, which just looks ridiculous. From some searching, it appears that this has been a problem for quite some time.

The only way to get HTML formatting to properly carry with a freshly-composed email is to manually format it using "Show Fonts" in the context menu on a case-by-case basis, which strikes me as needless for a v4 product.

Sigh. Anyone have any thoughts?