“ This message cannot be displayed”

Same problem on my iPad 4. On select emails, where I have cc’d myself, my own Mail program says ‘contact sender to use different format’. The “move email to trash then back to inbox” workaround works occasionally. I found another workaround: “Reply” to the email. But DO NOT REPLY by touching the arrow in the lower right corner of your screen. Instead, touch and hold on the particular header for your email (the left column where the box is blue when email is selected) and in the pop up menu touch “Reply.” A new message will open, and the original text is visible. What you do with it after this is up to you.

As mentioned elsewhere problem seems to be with inbuilt links/ logos within the email that iPhone and iPad fall over on. Can open the problem emails on MacBook Pro ok if haven’t moved or deleted them on the iPhone or iPad. It has to be a problem with the email system on these devices ( iPhone & iPad).

Doesn’t work for me. As mentioned elsewhere problem seems to be with inbuilt links/ logos within the email that iPhone and iPad fall over on. Can open the problem emails on MacBook Pro ok if haven’t moved or deleted them on the iPhone or iPad. It’s an iPhone/ iPad mail problem.

i haven’t got bcc to myself on so can’t be problem and also it is occasional emails I’m receiving not sending. As said before believe problem is due to companies including embedded logos with internet links. I.E. company sending email to say item posted and having a logo/link to the carrier company to enable tracking of the parcel. Can view email on iPhone and iPad as a forward to myself from MacBook Pro.

Thanks this worked for me, too. Yes inconvenient but it worked. Also, yes, this has been around for a long time. I had it on my 6S, then my X and now on my 12 pro. I just found your suggestion. It’s always been a problem with my own copy of email messages that I bcc myself sent from my iPhone so that I have a record on my MacBook Pro.

Some additional info on the problem where you have bcc'd to yourself. If you do the trick of deleting the message in the inbox, and then moving it back from the bin to the inbox, it now displays ok, but the copy in the sent folder has been deleted. If you try moving the message from the inbox to the sent folder (just for a laugh) it disappears completely from all folders.

Seem to have two problems here causing the message Can't Display. "One" the people using Bcc which can be switched off to cure it. "Two" problem I have and some others when we receive emails with web links and embedded logos in them e.g. a link to a courier delivering a parcel or restaurant order email with an embedded logo link to its website. Can this thread be split ? as the Bcc problem has a work around but the embedded logo problem seems not to have been resolved or a temporary work around found.

This only would happen on my old 2nd generation iPad Pro when I try sending something from safari to my self or if I bcc’d an email with the same address I was using to send to a recipient. All my Apple devices have current updates but today my relatively new (10 months) SE, update 14.4.2 experienced this problem for the first time.

This message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted. Ask the sender to send it again using a different format or email program.

text/plain

The recipient still got the email but when they tried to respond they received a notice saying the email could not be sent as it was not accepted by recipient. This is BS.

I have been reading about this for months now; absolute BS and no sign from Apple that it's being resolved... pathetic, as it's bloody annoying and time wasting. But there's plenty of stuff like that - I am at present trying to understand why I'm getting no sound alerts for emails etc, despite checking the settings countless times... no easy answers.

i had the same problem and sometimes resetting network setting fixed the alert sounds temporarily. Now I’ve given up but unfortunately sound alerts stills seems to working for all the wrong messages.

My work around for items I send to myself from Safari is to send them to my text/iMessage at least giving me access to the link when I want it.

An update on my “msg can’t be displayed” problem is after reboot of my appliance my recipient was able to send an rmsil to my gmail account but not my optonline account. Stranger still was that my daughter sent me a test email and that worked but I still could not reply with a bcc attached, she got garbage back, but without she saw my response.

That just about sums it up. Apple direct you here to find solutions from other people but the problem is really theirs to solve as they have created it. As their OS is such a closed system no other outside Tech person can get access to find a solution. It needs someone from Apple to read and act on these comments and find a solution.

Aug 21, 2012 — iPhone Tip – Message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted. ... If this happens to you, you can work around the problem by first deleting your message. Then go find the message in your trash and move the message back to your in-box. You should now be able to read the message properly. However in my case, I got the message the second time even though I WAS able to recover the email as suggested above.

I had the issue of emails sent by me not being able to be read by me as “....wrong formatted....”

I eventually solved the problem by clearing my mail boxes.( mainly a lot of unsolicited junk )

Hope this may help someone else

Gra

It sounds to me as if the device was updated whilst the mail app was running.

Solution is to force a stop by pressing the sleep key until the bar appears, then pressing and holding the home key until the app restarts- could take more than 10-15 secs for the app to reload.

This should fix the issue going forward, but won't fix existing emails.