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In Mail.app body of e-mails is blank in preview pane

Using Mail in OS X 10.8.4 on an iMac. Everything working fine earlier but now Mail app is acting up, a little slow on response and the body of all emails is blank in the preview pane to the right. If I double click on the email itself it opens up fine. I have restarted several times and also shut down completely attempting to correct. Several times after restart the mail app seemed to be back to normal but as soon as I start clicking through messges I again have the problem. I've read through some posts that were several years old that talked about deleting the envelope index @ ~/library/mail/envelope index but I do not see this anywhere in Finder.


Please help, thanks..

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 9, 2013 5:28 PM

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Posted on Jul 9, 2013 8:25 PM

There is a bug in Mail triggered by receiving a password-protected PDF as an attachment, and perhaps in other ways. The following seems to be a workaround, though I haven't tested it myself.

Download and run the free application TinkerTool (not "TinkerTool System"), select the Applications tab, and check the box marked

Don't display contents of attachments inline

Then relaunch Mail.

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Question marked as Best reply

Jul 9, 2013 8:25 PM in response to BumpaTron

There is a bug in Mail triggered by receiving a password-protected PDF as an attachment, and perhaps in other ways. The following seems to be a workaround, though I haven't tested it myself.

Download and run the free application TinkerTool (not "TinkerTool System"), select the Applications tab, and check the box marked

Don't display contents of attachments inline

Then relaunch Mail.

Aug 16, 2013 9:58 PM in response to Linc Davis

This worked for me, too—thank you!


I should note that I'm using 10.7.5 on a late 2007 MacBook (3,1). I've received password-protected PDF's for close to five years, but I didn't have this problem until recently (last month or so, maybe longer).


Is there any further reporting I need to do (besides this) to let Apple know this isn't just a Mountain Lion issue?


Thanks again!

Apr 8, 2015 8:40 AM in response to surfingirish

I am having the same problem too. I also downloaded TinkerTool but there is no such option to check under Applications tab.

Since TinkerTool says they only surface settings available in OS X, it seems that Apple removed that setting.

I disagree that this problem is "Solved".

Today this Mac problem seemed to be caused by selecting 5 messages and click-dragging them into a different folder.

Poof, reading panes became blank. Even when I double-click to open a message, the content is blank.

Restarting Mail fixes it ... until the next time.

In Mail.app body of e-mails is blank in preview pane

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