Invisible text in Mac Mail messages

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Level 1

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Invisible text in Mac Mail messages

I bought a new MacBook Pro with Catalina on it, migrated my content to it, and have been using Mac Mail on Catalina trouble-free for several months (and many years before that with other OS versions).

Suddenly a couple of weeks ago I started getting messages with blank areas of text and/or small bold question mark-in-a-box icons where actual content should be.

The text is actually there - I can copy it out and paste it into a text editor to read it. It's just invisible.

There is always some readable content in the emails - it doesn't affect all the content.

This seems to affect certain senders. Most emails look fine but so far 3 senders have sent me mail with invisible text.

Viewing raw source of the messages reveals no obvious tags or other reasons why this text should be invisible.

I tried disabling my Mail plugins (MsgFiler, Letter Opener, GPGMail) but that didn't change anything.

I also tried rebuilding the mailboxes containing the troublesome messages.

Restarting Mail or the Mac didn't help.

There was a recent Catalina update I believe - to 10.15.7. I wonder if there's a relationship.

Any thoughts?

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jun 3, 2021 11:31 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

67,594 points

Jun 4, 2021 8:52 AM in response to bobmeador

This looks like a font problem.

Try opening Font Book and validating your fonts.

If this is only on certain senders, it is possible that they are sending rich text mail using some font that is problematic.

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Answer 2

bobmeador Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 6, 2021 11:11 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

You're right - it is a font problem. If I reply to the message and select the text and change the font, it shows up.

The bad font appears to be Times Roman. That is specifically the family "Times" and the typeface "Roman" (according to the fonts palette in Mail). The available typefaces under Times are Roman, Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. Seems odd to have Roman as what appears to be a style, since Roman is really the name of the family.

Font Book unfortunately did not identify the problem using the approach you recommended, but when I drilled into the Times New Roman folder in FB I saw there were duplicates, which I have disabled, but no change in the emails. Relaunching Mail did not help. There is also a "Times" folder. Times and Times New Roman. Seems like the latter is a system font so I can't or shouldn't disable it.

Any thoughts on what to try next?

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Invisible text in Mac Mail messages

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