Invisible body text in Outlook 2007

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Yorker - 12 Dec 2007 19:32 GMT

O/S: Windows Vista
Firewall: Comodo
Anti-virus: Avast (e-mail scanning turned off).
Mail filtering: Mailwasher Pro.

(Tests reveal that none of the above has caused this issue).

I have read and tried a lot of the suggestions concerning this problem.

Here's what I have discovered.

1. If I CTRL+A and copy the contents of the original inbound e-mail into a
text editor, such as Wordpad, I get the same effect (missing body text) as
the e-mail. However, if within the text editor, I press CRTL+A I can see the
highlighted text. Click inside the text editor and everything except for the
hyperlinks disappears from view, i.e. I'm back where I started.

2. I also tried CTRL+A + Copy + Paste Special into Word and the e-mail
copied successfully as Unformatted Text or Unformatted Unicode Text. When I
tried either RTF or HTML format, only the hyperlinks were visible, exactly
the same condition the e-mails are arriving in.

Therefore, this has to be a problem with the format of inbound e-mails.

Question: How does one prevent Outlook from stripping away the (HTML)
formatting, thereby rendering the e-mail text invisible to the recipient?

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Milhouse Van Houten - 12 Dec 2007 19:48 GMT

> O/S: Windows Vista
> Firewall: Comodo
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]
> Question: How does one prevent Outlook from stripping away the (HTML)
> formatting, thereby rendering the e-mail text invisible to the recipient?

Is this it? It's one of the things rolled up into SP1 yesterday. It was
previously available as a hotfix back in June:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939596

"When you view an HTML-formatted e-mail message in the preview pane or when
you open an HTML-formatted e-mail message, the body of the e-mail message is
blank."

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Yorker - 15 Dec 2007 20:36 GMT

> > O/S: Windows Vista
> > Firewall: Comodo
[quoted text clipped - 35 lines]
> blank."
>

Tried the following steps;

1. Installed the hotfix: the problem persists.
2. Removed the hotfix and SP1 and reinstalled SP1: the problem persists.

Note that I have previously tried removing/reinstalling Outlook, again to no
effect.

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digiskin - 18 Dec 2007 16:22 GMT

> > > O/S: Windows Vista
> > > Firewall: Comodo
[quoted text clipped - 42 lines]
> Note that I have previously tried removing/reinstalling Outlook, again to no
> effect.

Yorker:

I had this same problem and just resolved it...

go to tools -> options and then click on the mail format tab.
the last section is for how plain text emails should be formatted...
in the settings there for font... change the font color from automatic
to black or something you prefer.

this fixed the invisible text in all my problem emails.

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Yorker - 18 Dec 2007 20:55 GMT

> > > > O/S: Windows Vista
> > > > Firewall: Comodo
[quoted text clipped - 53 lines]
>
> this fixed the invisible text in all my problem emails.

My solution differs slightly from your suggestion, so here is the process.

1. Tools/Options/Mail Format and then click on Stationery and Fonts button.
2. Select the Personal Stationery tab.
3. Go down to 'Composing and reading plain text messages'.
4. Click on the Font button.
5. Look at the drop-down box 'Font Colour'. In my case, it was blank, so I
tried resetting it to 'Automatic' first.
6. Checked an old e-mail with 'invisible' text and I could read it as normal.

Note that if this hadn't worked, I was going to follow your suggestion and
switch the font colour to black.

I couldn't have done this without you pointing me in the right direction.

Merry Christmas.

P.S. How did this situation come about? I made no changes, so it's over to
you Microsoft.

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