So if what you're telling me is that I cannot use any kind of "anti..." software as it will corrupt apple's mail platform/database, I'm genuinely worried.
If you find installing a non-Apple "anti-virus" product to convey a benefit to you, you must always remain vigilant of its ability to cause adverse effects, which nearly all those products will do. In no case should you allow such software to delete or "quarantine" suspicious files including emails or their attachments.
If it should identify something suspicious, stop there and investigate. Most of those products will do nothing other than identify Windows malware that has no effect on a Mac. If that malware is contained in an email attachment, and you forward the email (including that attachment) to a colleague with a Windows PC, the malware will certainly be forwarded along with it, but it's up to that Windows PC user to dispose of it. Or, you can elect to forward the email without the attachment.
Otherwise, suspicious emails or spam should simply be deleted in the normal manner.
You might be able to fix the empty email message by rebuilding the Mailbox, or all Mailboxes in your Mail app. To do that please read Mail for Mac: Rebuild mailboxes.
It will take a few moments to complete, depending on the total number of messages in those Mailboxes. Until it finishes, it's normal for the message preview column's contents to flash repeatedly as it rebuilds the message database. Mail's operation will also be slow until it finishes.
It would be prudent to back up your Mac prior to doing that, but if rebuilding a Mailbox causes any email messages to be deleted they were probably not recoverable anyway. I recommend backing up in this particular circumstance only in an abundance of caution, but it's something everyone ought to be doing.
... Is Apple working on this problem?
I find iCloud Mail's server-side spam protection to be pretty effective. If you use email services other than iCloud Mail, look into your email provider's server-side options. Other than that, Apple isn't going to take an interest in Windows malware (which is probably what you encountered, given the overwhelming abundance of malware for that platform).