Question : Is there a mail.app plugin (for 10.6.x) that provides a simple font menu in the toolbar?

Mail.app is great - except for the idiotic floating font menu.  Drives me nuts.  No one needs that many options for fonts in an email.

I'm looking for a mail.app plugin that provides a simple font/size menu in the mail composition toolbar, like just about every other application you've ever used in your life.

Anyone know of something that does this?

Answer : Is there a mail.app plugin (for 10.6.x) that provides a simple font menu in the toolbar?

Short answer is NO.  There isn't a plugin for a font Menu in Apple Mail.
Apple are also not particularly responsive if you were hoping for them to develop one in the next release of Apple Mail.

These are the 2 mail sources of Apple Mail plugins
http://tikouka.net/mailapp/
http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm

You may also have noted that a lot of OSX applications now use the floating Font dialog box so it is not confined to Apple Mail.
You might want to have a look at alternative OSX mail clients such as Postbox or Thunderbird.