Mail not displaying html

What are you seeing in Mail - an empty message viewer window, raw HTML, or something different?

That option is grayed out with my non-displaying HTML emails

Yep, that option is greyed out for me too. I have mails which render correctly sometimes and then not at other times, very frustrating. One email that isn't rendering correctly has this header at the top, no idea what it means...

'This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------= NextPart_000_003C01C81C6F.257325B0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit'

These are mails that I get from my colleague every day and the previous one's render perfectly well.

Here are some other things I see when I have this issue:

1) The issue is only occurring on "NEW" messages. Old messages that have rendered previously are fine.
2) If I shutdown mail3, the problem goes away on the message I was just having the view problem on.
3) It's random. Sometimes it will work fine forever and then, one message has this issue. Nothing I can see that indicates there is a pattern of events that make this occur.

Here's what I did -- Seems to have worked:

1. Download PREF SETTER here

2. Be sure Mail.App is quit. Using PREF SETTER open the file com.apple.mail.plist in your Home/Library/Preferences folder

3. Scroll down to "PreferPlainText" -- more than likely this is set to 'True'

4. Click on 'True' to set it to 'False'

5. Save file and quit Pref Setter.

6. Open Mail and hopefully all should be fine again

Thanks for the tip!

I wasn't afraid to mess with the preferences, so I followed your advice. I did not have a PreferPlainText setting in the com.apple.mail.plist file, so I created one using PrefSetter. I set it to a value of false. When I restarted Mail, the troublesome messages were correctly displayed!'

I can say that the common problem in my case is mail that I receive from one individual. The mail itself has been forwarded multiple times, and has several different headers embedded. Junk mail...

Steve

I've got the same problem, though it's fairly consistent (not random). Each week I receive an HTML email from my ISP with my site's statistics, and I've not been able to read one yet with Mail ["Version 3.1 (914/915)"].

All of the View>Message>(alternatives) menu items are grayed out no matter how I try to read/select/etc. the message.

I tried the PREF SETTER suggestion from above, and now I have a preference PreferPlainText (type Boolean) set to False (it wasn't there so I created one) and it makes no difference.

This is kind of disconcerting as I was deleting "empty" emails for a while before I realized that they were not empty! Who knows what great jokes my sister sent me that I missed...

BTW I can view the message if I look at the raw source (in this case the email is mostly text).

That worked for me. Thank you 🙂