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OT – Attack of the As? Mail is showing As instead of E-mail content?
Hi all:
Apologies for the off topic subject but there doesn’t seem to be an Apple Mail board here. Just in the past few days, most of the e-mails I am receiving are showing up as full of little As, some inside boxes, some just lines of As. It seems that they are mostly showing up instead of signatures, graphics, etc. Very strange. I use Mail and I can send and receive my own e-mails with graphics attached and they show up fine. I mailed myself an e-mail with a graphic attached.
Tired deleting Mail prefs (com.apple.mail.plist) but unfortunately that is where Apple also keeps your mailboxes so I couldn’t delete the .plist.
Has anyone experienced this weirdness and if so, how did you fix it? It is really obnoxious not being able to see half of the content of your e-mails. Some logos show up but most seem to be getting turned into As as well as a lot of content.
Thanks,
Dan Brockett
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22 Replies
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I haven’t had this exact problem, but I have had other Mail app weirdness, that I found frustrating. I fixed it by switching to Mozilla Thunderbird. I like it a lot better, and it isn’t as twitchy.
You might try it, it’s free and Open Source, and a seamless switchover.
https://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com -
Well, I don’t think it’s a problem with Apple Mail. I’ve been using it for years and have never seen your symptoms.
Try Apple’s Mail support forum.
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I’ll keep this solution in mind Scott, but I am pretty stubborn when it comes to fixing issues like this. I want to know why it happened, how it happened, the root cause and how to solve it.
Think I may have to make an appointment with a genius at an Apple store and grill them on what is going on. It is their program.
I have a feeling it is a corrupted font possibly, I am trying some ideas out and have found some correlation between switching the prefs>fonts and colors to other fonts. It doesn’t stop the issue but when I highlight Arial, it switches once fine. Then I tried Arial bold and it worked fine. Switch back to Arial and in the prefs dialog, the sample where it should say Arial goes to all small boxes with As in them. I tried removing Arial and another more recently installed new font from the font folder but that didn’t solve it.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Dan
A Producer Who Is Also A DP? Yep, that’s Me.
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Me too, I have never seen or experienced this issue either.
I posted on the Apple forum this morning, will let you all know if I discover a fix.
Thanks!
Dan
A Producer Who Is Also A DP? Yep, that’s Me.
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That is not likely to be an Apple Mail problem (if so, it would be an issue of the character encoding of incoming e-mails being interpreted incorrectly, very unlikely).
The first thing to check is whether you have a corrupted font cache.
OnyX is a free OS X utility that can fix this and more. You can download it from Apple.
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Hi BJ:
I am open to trying anything to get this resolved. I will check out OnyX and will report back on what it tells me or does.
Thanks,
Dan
A Producer Who Is Also A DP? Yep, that’s Me.
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Strangely enough, I just saw this today in Safari. Never seen it before and my Mail is fine.
Only new thing I’ve done is install Office Mac 2011.
A restart of Safari made it go away.
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I wish a restart of Mail would make this go away, but it doesn’t. Very obnoxious. Is it possible this could be a result of that rarest of species, an actual OSX virus?
Dan
A Producer Who Is Also A DP? Yep, that’s Me.
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I seriously doubt it’s a virus.
Do you do any routine maintenance tasks? (repair permissions, etc?)
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