Mail won't display HTML mails

Glad it helped, but keep your eye on things. I find it hard to believe a corrupted preferences file was corrupted ONLY by turning off HTML.

But maybe you'll get lucky.

You sure no one was messing with your computer?

Kevin

You are right, Kevin: in my situation the problem was not solved. If I want to try the hard way (delete the pref file) may be you know a way to export the configuration of accounts (I have 10 of this!) ?

Most likely I was messing around myself 😉

But the only thing I can remember is that I use Onyx
to change some parameters. The only setting affecting
Mail there is something (free translation from
German) 'new mails in plain text'. But that seems to
refer to composing new messages and not receiving.
And I still have plain text set in my Mail
preferences.

Ah, that's probably it. You can set outgoing plain text easily in Mail, no need for Onyx to do it, so that was most likely turning off the HTML with a similar script. In which case that would mean no preference corruption so nothing to worry about.


Kevin

You are right, Kevin: in my situation the problem was
not solved. If I want to try the hard way (delete the
pref file) may be you know a way to export the
configuration of accounts (I have 10 of this!) ?

Sorry, no. The whole point is to get rid of a corrupted preference. I suppose it's possible to go in and rewrite some of the scripts by hand but you'd really have to know what you are doing and I imagine even then it would be a daunting task. Probably much simpler just to reset everything.

Do you happen to have a second computer with the same settings? If you do you can transport that preference file over and replace the corrupted one with it.

Kevin

FWIW, here's what Onyx (version 1.7.4) Help says about the option in English:

" New messages with the format Text in Mail: By default, Mail displays the new messages with RTF or HTML format. This option allows you to display them with Text format, without style and without the attachments preview. This speeds up the display. To see the attachments, click the Save button located in the header of the message."

FWIW #2:

It may be worth running the Terminal command:

plutil -s ~/Library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

to see if it finds any problems with your preference file. If it does, you know you need to go through the hassle of replacing the file. If it doesn't, it doesn't prove that you don't have some problem with it, only that the syntax of the file is correct & manual editing (if you know what you are doing) has some hope of success.

Thanks Kevin, this solved my problems, too.