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How to view apparently blank Mail messages Apps
Sometimes I get these email messages (typically acknowledgment emails from e-tailers or billing notices) which either look completely blank or show up as gobbledygook in Mail.app's viewer. The message size tells me that there's text there, and viewing the raw source of the message usually reveals the text. One example is the "we have received your donation" acknowledgment from Doctors Without Borders, which looks completely blank in Mail.app, even though the message size is 2.9KB.

It turns out that these messages are usually of "Content-Type: multipart/related" or "multipart/alternative". The idea is that the same content will be sent out in multiple versions (such as text/plain and text/html) so that your email client can display the preferred format. Unfortunately, I think many of the sites that send out such messages do not have the software configured properly, so that the plain text alternative, which is usually listed as the first alternative, is either blank or corrupted.

You can view the content of these messages by selecting View -> Message -> Next Alternative. This will cycle through the other versions of the message, and (usually) these at least one of the other versions will be readable.
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How to view apparently blank Mail messages | 8 comments | Create New Account
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How to view apparently blank Mail messages
Authored by: mateosdad on Jan 03, '05 04:09:08PM

Actually, the menu path is View-> Show-> Next Alternative



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How to view apparently blank Mail messages
Authored by: danielmaui on Jan 03, '05 04:35:36PM

Quote: Actually, the menu path is View-> Show-> Next Alternative

No it's not. Not in Mail 1.3.9, anyway. The original post is correct.



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How to view apparently blank Mail messages
Authored by: ryansking on Jan 03, '05 04:44:44PM

Of course you can use Cmd-] and Cmd-[ to cycle through the alternatives.



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Bless yer heart!
Authored by: mikerose on Jan 03, '05 04:46:30PM

I have long wondered how on earth I could read QuickMail MIME messages on Mail.app, since Entourage has no problem with them. Thanks for this killer hint!

Now, if there were a way to set Plain Text Alternative as the default view...



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Set plaintext as default view
Authored by: ptwithy on Jan 03, '05 05:13:07PM

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030711201917175



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Bless yer heart!
Authored by: dfbills on Jan 03, '05 08:14:51PM

How about a way to keep mail.app from sending multi-part mime that gets mangled on exchange servers...

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-d



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How to view apparently blank Mail messages
Authored by: mkcheme on Jan 03, '05 04:52:22PM

Huh...my Doctors Without Borders acknowledgement came through just fine on Mail v. 1.3.9...

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"I'm a chemical SUPERfreak, actually"



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How to view apparently blank Mail messages
Authored by: kyliu99 on Jan 03, '05 08:07:07PM

Could be that my POP forwarding was mangling the headers on that one. You are right, other people aren't having issues.



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