14.3 Mail.app - Corrupted/Garbled Text When Composing Messages

Thanks, and it happens right when text is attempting to wrap or modify existing wrap. I've never seen this buy in Apple Mail before. Really strange, and sad to see Apple didn't catch it. Very easy to test.

Not that it is much of a consolation, but the actual text isn't changing, just the visual in the editor. I told one of my users that it took me longer to notice because I'm a horrible typist and have to look at my keyboard so I didn't see the issue until they pointed it out. 🙂

P.S. I've found that (on my iMac which is what I tried this on) *sometimes* when this happens in the mail composition window, I can by clicking (not in any random window, but rather) in the Apple Mail Viewer window (the main window of Apple Mail) and then clicking back in the composition window, cause the misrendering to go back to being a good rendering when the second click returns the focus to the composition window. Sometimes when that doesn't work, clicking back and forth between the two windows a few times fixes things. And sometimes it does not no matter how many times I try that. (The rich/plain text approach mentioned in this thread didn't work for me. And I suppose what I just suggested may not work for others... or for me the next times I try it. ;-})

My temporary workaround if it text display glitches when I need to review what I've written is to grab the window and resize it to force an "accurate" rewrap. That usually clears it up. Looking forward to the update that fixes this!

This problem on my MacBook Air Apple M1 2020 with OS 14.3 is maddening. I'm composing my emails in TextEdit because I can't stand the constant interruption of resizing the window. But thanks to all the good comments under here under this question, I now realize that what you type IS there, but it just may not be displaying correctly. So my new workaround is to simply command-tilde (~) from the email I'm composing to the main Mail window and command-tilde again back to my composing. Try it!

It's disappointing Apple didn't discover this error, which took me about 5 minutes to find. I compose in Mail all day, so this is a very frustrating problem. The screen shots in this thread are good.

Hitting undo just messes you up more. It's really making me nervous and now I have to re-read every email twice before I send it.

Same here - very annoying, and I hope short-lived.

Ad-hoc cure: undo followed by redo usually corrects the glitch (with a stable result at that point). So it's just a matter of typing cmd-z followed by shift-cmd-z, which is quick, but it has do be done all the time while the problem persists in principle.

Same. I just installed Sonoma (14.3) five days ago on a 2021 M1 iMac 24" and an M2 MacBook Air and noticed this immediately. Have been running in Safe Mode on the MacBook Air the last couple of days and haven’t noticed the problem but will stay in Safe Mode a little longer to see if it appears. But obviously, this needs a fix. 

I have experienced the same. I think it even happens in Safari. I witnessed, that in a Safari text box my written text suddenly wraps around, seemingly unnecessary. At first, I thought it was just some kind of late readjusting. Later on I witnessed the same behaviour in Apple Mail and then I saw that it wasn't just a readjusting, but my text was replaced with the paragraph above. And that's why the computer had to readjust the text, since it changed.

I think the same happened in the Safari text box.

That's a nasty bug and I hope Apple fixes it soon. At least I am not alone with it which makes it more likely to be addressed rapidly.

I am on an M1 Max MacBook Pro.

On my Mac mini M1 I've seen this – infrequently – in Mail.app and Safari (when composing a long forum post). I don't use Notes, and I haven't seen it in any third-party app that presumably doesn't use Webkit. I'm sure the issue has appeared with macOS 14.3.

I haven't so far seen it on my 2015 Intel MacBook Pro. This is happily running 14.3, but with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, which I'm guessing adds an extra layer to the rendering process.

It's been happening to me also on my 2018 Mac mini and running 14.3. Started since the 14.3 update. I was glad to find this post since I didn't know what was going on. It makes trying to write a email so frustrating with lines of text moving around, large spacing also forming and disappearing. Text overlaying on top of other text.

Sad to have no peace even trying to type a email now. Always so many bugs. I did send feedback in the app on the Mac to apple. Couldn't even switch users today from the menu bar. Fast user switching wasn't responding. I wanted to update for the security fixes of 14.3 but think I will hold off in the future. I don't know. All these bugs are making using my Mac even worse.

Seeing this on my M3 Max. The bug behaves like the issue is related to the predictive text, but it does appear to be a "display-only" issue. For example, if I cut the garbled text and paste it back in, then it displays correctly.

Perhaps worth noting that I only ever compose messages in plain text, but I'm not sure if that matters for the bug.

I'd said yesterday that I hadn't had the problem in a couple of days after starting my MacBook Air in Safe Mode. But today the problem occurred while in Safe Mode so just wanted to report that.

Thanks to the folks who identified the problem as being associated with the inline predictive text feature. That kind of figures. At least we have a specific cause. Hope it doesn't take long for Apple to fix it.

To avoid having to resize the window a fix as you type work around seems to be can just add a space (or any character) at the start of the messed up paragraph (or paragraph above) to force a reformat of the paragraph which usually clears the garbled bits, then just take the added space (or other character) away again and (usually) are left with correct text correctly formatted - although if you then keep typing further the issue will probably come back (probably differently) and require further adding and removing of spaces/characters. fingers cross Apple release a fix for this in next update of Sonoma.

I have posted a couple of times about this garbled text issue already. But I started seeing another 14.3 email anonymity today and wondered if anyone else has seen this. It has to do with adding signatures to emails. What I am now seeing is that after composing an email and then switching the outgoing account from account A to account B, and account B has a signature associated with it, the Mail app will place the signature in a random place within the text of the email message. This seems to only be the case if the email message also has a web link as part of the text. Anyone else seeing this?

Thank you for taking the time to do that Eric Lane. I remember having an issue a year ago where it was escalated and a higher up person was assigned to my case and I was even given a contact email and phone number they would be in touch in 24 hours. I was surprised by the attention given to me. I ended up figuring the problem out myself but the info was forwarded to engineering also.

It caused me a lot of time but also the person at apple helping me for which I was grateful since they still helped me out a lot. Sad seems like we will have to wait until the next macOS update to see a fix for this. I don't see a fix or it mentioned in the 14.4 beta in the feedback app. Glad I don't write longer emails much these days which is when it mostly happens. When I said I use a 2018 Mac mini don't know if people realized that is an Intel Mac.