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Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Rick Churchill
I sometimes get the following message from an incoming email on my iPhone iCloud IMAP account.

“This message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted....."

On the Mac it displays the proper email message.

I read a 4 year old solution where the message is deleted then read from the Trash but this only gave me a series of numbers and letters.

Any ideas?

Re: Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Mick Burrell
How was it formatted?

Re: Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Tony Still
To help answer Mick's question, try the following on the Mac:
* Select the message
* Choose View > Message > Raw Source
* Look for lines starting "Content-Type:", there may be several.

This may reveal some unusual formatting that Mail on the iPhone can't read. Is there any consistency in the sender of these messages? If so, there may be a clue in the mail client program they're using. Look for one of the following fields that might be present and might tell you:
User-Agent, Mail-System-Version, Originating-Client, X-Mailer

Re: Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Rick Churchill
Bugger due to inactivity the reply I typed here has been wiped!

Here is the gist of what I said:
Thanks Mike, I was struggling to answer you when Tony's reply showed me the way.

Here are some details:
Email 1
From: “name”@gmail.com
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=Apple-Mail-39057BBF-97EE-421E-BF7E-86F1CF565E6E
X-Mailer: iPad Mail (16D39)
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Email2
From: “name”@gmail.com
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (16C101)
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

You will note that they are both from Apple devices and both using Google mail

In the meantime when I was recovering this data I moved both emails out of the Trash on my Mac. You remember that I put them there on the phone as I had read an article whereby moving them to the Trash made them readable. In fact re-reading the article it advised moving them back out of the Trash to make them readable which is exactly what has happened. When I looked at the messages on the phone they had been moved back to my Inbox and were readable.
I will email my friends for them to send me further emails to see if:
a) They arrive unreadable but this work-around is valid.
b) The latest phone update 12.1.4 which I did last night cures the issue

Re: Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Tony Still
So it's iOS to iPhone messages and plain text/UTF-8: it doesn't get much simpler than that. Your first message will have at least one more part with its own type ("multipart") but I frankly doubt that that is relevant.

Since they're both gmail accounts, I wonder if Google broke something while they were fumbling around extracting all your personal data 😟.

Re: Mail messages replaced by error message

Avatar Rick Churchill
I have received emails from the same people but each has arrived readable. Perhaps it is now fixed.
 
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