"this message was downloaded as plain text"

Hello Apple IOS Technical Support,

I have some issue from iPhone/iPad (IOS 10) with ActiveSync (Exchange 2013 SP1) and I see this message was downloaded as plain text (Download full message). You can see from picture.

How to fix and Force email download in HTML or text format on iPhone/iPad (IOS 10) with ActiveSync (Exchange 2013 SP1)

If email message size Less than 1 mb can open message normal html format, but message larger than 1 mb and then convert to plain text alert message "Download full message"

You can help me to fix this issue.

Hello Boongerd. As you can see from this thread, the does not seem to be a way to fix it in the Mail app. You might look at other apps, like Outlook maybe. I use AltaMail, which is a full featured mail tool, not a demo program like Mail.

The ios mail app is the problem here. The best solution is to install the Outlook app and add your mail account in the same way as you did on the mail app.

All emails come through as HTML then, it's also a much neater user interface.

Getting notifications for the emails is also very handy for business use.

If some are downloading fine, and others aren't, sounds more like the source of the email might be the issue. Are the bad emails typically from the same place? Also, might want to see if in your advanced mail settings if you have the "Use Secure SSL on Incoming Mail" on. Turning it on or off might help.

I know this is months down the road, but I think I might be seeing the same problem. Our Chief Operating Officer is having this issue as well.

1) If an HTML email is sent with an attachment (in this case, an Excel spreadsheet around 146K in size), the email is downloaded as plain text unless the button is pushed,

2) If the EXACT SAME email is sent from the same sender without the attachment, the HTML content in the body is displayed correctly without needing to press the button.

My Google-fu isn't finding anything helpful here. Is there a setting anywhere (or a third-party mail app) that will force the HTML content to be displayed?

Have you found a solution to this? I have a client with a similar issue.

No solution was found, however after some thought, it did make sense...sort of. It's a safety precaution. If you have an HTML email by itself, it's all fine and good. If you have a plain-text email with an attachment, no problem. But the moment you have HTML and an attachment, you have potentially executable code that could infect your device. It's Apple Paranoia, which comes standard with iOS.

My solution (which was rejected), was to provide the user with an Android device.

I have spent the last couple of days trying to figure this out. I'm sending reports to our CEO (telco) through SQL Server Reporting Services. The emails are in MHTML and when they exceed a certain size limit, the Mail app skips all pics (which look like attachments).

Since there is absolutely no documentation on the Mail app and no way to change its settings or debug it, I started trying to test with different email/attachment sizes. So far I've figured that all emails under ~140-150kb get downloaded in full. When I exceed the 140kb threshold, I start getting issues. Still, it seems like it's not a simple limit which governs what gets downloaded. When my email is heavy on the attachments, or contains only attachments, everything under 140ish kb seems to work fine. However, if I have some text, things get messier. I have a report which Outlook tells me is around 235kb and it renders ok, but when it gets to like 240kb, it doesn't.

All this leads me to think that Apple really should disclose any thresholds which are hardcoded in the Mail app (and yes, it's not an ActiveSync mailbox policy either since that's unlimited on our Exchange 2007 servers) if it wants to present its OS as a robust and enterprise-ready platform, which it currently is not. Even better, why not expose these so we can set them somehow? And why not rely on ActiveSync policies for these so we can manage this properly?

For now, our execs will be using PDFs until we get more info from Apple.

And no, it's not possible to drop SSL (how does this matter anyway?), or to change the sender. It's plain HTML, it renders fine under certain size and there is absolutely no excuse for not letting us know how this works.

bpenev wrote:

...and there is absolutely no excuse for not letting us know how this works.

But this has been Apple's policy from day one - "it just works and you don't need to know how" 😝

I see that this thread hasn't been touched upon in a while. I was hoping that there was a solution to "this message was downloaded as plain text".

We have exchange 2012 environment.

any way to receive full download without manually retrieving?

Thanks

Hello Diana.McCall. Thank you for your answer.