"This message has no content" - anyone know how to fix this email problem?

Question

"This message has no content" - anyone know how to fix this email problem?

Hi - Happy new year !

I am receiving emails with nothing in the body, saying "This message has no content". This has been happening on and off for ages, but I am normally able to see 99% of my emails clearly and promptly.

But half of today's emails have this problem and I can't find a work around: I have closed and reopened Mail and also looked at some online 'solutions', but none of the steps seem to apply to me.

I am running Mac OS 10.15.7 and using Apple Mail to receive and send to/from several email accounts, all of which are Gmail. I am not using any weird fonts etc., just what came out of the box.

Grateful if anyone has any simple solutions to this annoying issue. Thanks

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 1, 2021 1:17 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

125,260 points

Jan 1, 2021 5:17 AM in response to Doctor Zhivago

Ordinarily this happens when someone (that you know) decides that the Mail Subject content is the message, and no message body content was sent. I do not receive unsolicited emails without a message body, and this would be cross-purpose to anyone deliberately sending SPAM. Are these emails with truncated content from the same or different sources?

I would reboot the Mac, and relaunch Mail to re-establish connections to your Mail server(s), to see if the issue continues.

There may also be an issue with your Mail ISP server, or one of the mail relay servers in the path to your Mail ISP, where the message body is truncated. I would raise that concern with your Mail ISP support team — if the problem persists after a reboot.

The notice "This message has no content" comes from Apple Mail, and is not contained in the Mail header fields that you can process with a Mail rule.

I have a short AppleScript tool that displays the sender's email address, and also the return path to the real mail server that sent the email. If you want that as a diagnostic tool, I can post it here.

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Answer 2

Jan 1, 2021 6:05 AM in response to VikingOSX

The reboot didn't change anything. I also read on another forum that this issue can sometimes be caused by the user opening emails in Apple mail before the content has been downloaded. The programme then thinks that everything has been read when you open them, so doesn't attempt to download them again. I know it is an issue that affects many Apple users intermittently and despite asking for a fix, none has so far been provided. I will send the usual bug report to Apple Feedback.

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Answer 3

mulberry58

Level 6

10,442 points

Jan 1, 2021 3:30 AM in response to Doctor Zhivago

Is it possible that this is only the case with unwanted advertisement mails?

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Answer 4

Jan 1, 2021 5:11 AM in response to mulberry58

Thanks for your reply but sadly no, this affects any type of email randomly. I have affected emails that were received/sent from very early this morning through to mid morning, all of them from senders whose output is reasonably important to me and which I read on most occasions. These affected emails are all juxtaposed with emails whose entire content is visible in the normal way. There is no pattern to it - different email addresses of mine are affected at random.

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Answer 5

Jan 1, 2021 5:31 AM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for your very helpful reply. I will try a reboot. I have checked the affected emails in my Google (web) accounts and they are all displaying fine there. On other forums I have read that there are occasional issues between Apple/Google which cause these issues. I will let you know if I need that diagnostic tool - thanks again.

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Answer 6

VikingOSX

Level 10

125,260 points

Jan 1, 2021 7:58 AM in response to Doctor Zhivago

Ok. I don't have this issue with three email accounts across two Mail ISP, all converging in Apple Mail on Big Sur 11.1. I purposely have no Catalina installations here to test that platform further.

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"This message has no content" - anyone know how to fix this email problem?

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