Hi friends, I hope that you are all well and good!
A friend forwarded an email newsletter to me from her Hotmail account to my iCloud account. Using Apple Mail, I can see and read the email just fine on my iPhone, iPad, and even in iCloud, but not on my 2023 M2 MacBook Pro (MacOS v15.3.2, Mail v16.0). The email content of this single message appears completely blank, though I can see all of the header information. I don’t have any Mail extensions running. However, I do have Apple’s Private Relay, but Mail’s Protect Mail Activity is disabled, including the option to block all remote content. I also have Little Snitch running with two blocklists enabled, but even with Little Snitch disabled, I still can’t see the contents of the email.
What am I missing? What am I overlooking that would prevent me from being able to see the contents of this particular email?
No help here, but you are not alone. I haven’t had this happen (yet) with Sequoia, but it happened multiple times (albeit rarely) with Big Sur. Usually restarting Mail fixed; I believe I needed to restart the Mac at least once. I hope someone can provide a simple fix.
I’ve seen that happen before, but never with a message that I absolutely needed on my Mac. If I could read it on another device, that was fine with me.
Have you tried Mailbox menu / Synchronize?
If nothing else helps, if it is an IMAP or Exchange account, I’d almost suggest deleting the account and adding it back again. I have done that once or twice before when I was having issues with mailbox contents.
I’d suspect a bad cache or something. What if you forward the message to yourself from one of the other devices? That would differentiate between a bad copy of the message and something inherent to it that was causing the problem.
@ace, that’s a really good idea! But, sadly it made no difference when I forward the email from my Apple account to my Yahoo account via my iPhone. There’s still no content in Apple Mail on my MBP. Very strange!
That suggests there’s something in the message code that’s tripping up Apple Mail on the MacBook Pro. It’s unusual but certainly not unheard of. You could try forwarding it to another address if you had one or viewing the email in another app, but at this point, it’s purely a matter of how much you enjoy solving the technical puzzle, given that you already know what’s in the message.
The contents are a newsletter that were forwarded to me, which I’ve since signed up for. I’d like to resolve the issue so that when the subscribed newsletter is sent directly to me that I don’t encounter any issues.
I’d wait to see if it actually happens again before dedicating any more brain cells to the problem. The most plausible scenario is that it was a one-off.
I have seen this occasionally. Rather than the message being completely blank, I suspect if you scroll down there will be hundreds of blank lines, then one line of the message, then hundreds more blank lines, followed by the second line etc etc.
I’ve had iPadOS Mail display a blank message body (from a standard IMAP server), but it would reappear correctly if I backed up to the previous message and then returned to it.
I’ve seen this kind of behavior occasionally. Double clicking on the message header to open the message in it’s own window makes it visible for me, and also causes it to appear in the default message pane.
I have the same experience. When such blank emails appear, they are always sent from Outlook clients. The essential information can be read when I forward the message (just open the forwarding window, do not actually forward).
