10.6.4′s Black Email of Death
Somewhere, in recent updates to Safari 5.0 (included in the 10.6.4 update), something went wrong with the way applications pass text to each other.
A post at MacFixIt 
suggests that the fault lies with WebKit, which is now “using rgb(0,0,0) as the value for the CSS “background-color” property for messages”.
Whatever the cause, emails generated in other apps often arrive in Mail.app with black text on a black background.
Here are some I made earlier: one generated by mailing a to-do from iCal:
Another created by running an applescript over a blog post in Safari:
Suggested workarounds vary in complexity. Some involve dragging iCal appointments to the Desktop and then into Mail, others suggest copying all the blacked-out text, cutting and pasting it into another app like Textedit to turn it into plain text and then pasting it back again.
Unmarked Software, the developer of TextSoap, has even produced a stand-alone Mac OS X Service, FixMailText , as a work around.
In fact, the fix is quite simple. Apple’s technote on the problem points out that all you need to do in most cases is
1. Place the cursor into the body of the email.
2. Press ⇧+⌘+T (Shift + Command + T) to turn it into plain text. Or select “Make Plain Text” from Mail’s Format menu
3. Carry on.
It also suggests a slightly more convoluted workaround for those who need to preserve links embedded in Rich Text:
If you want to preserve links the message might contain:
- Click in the body of the Mail message
- Press Command-A to select all
- Press Command-X to cut
- Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
- Press Option-Shift-Command-V (Paste and Match Style)
This will replace the black-on-black text with text that uses your default Mail font settings.
As others have said, a technote from Apple on the problem is as close as one will get to acknowledgement that something is wrong.
Hopefully a proper fix is not far away.
UPDATE: 6 July 2010 Mail Attachment Iconizer, a mail plugin that is also afflicted with this bug has been updated with a release (2.1.10) that resolves the problem. [ via MacFixIt }
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Tags: Apple Mail, applescript, bug, iCal, mail.app, Safari, WebKit, workaround
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:40 pm
“2. Press ?+?+T (Shift + Control + T)”
Should be: “(Shift + Command + T)” – I think ;)
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Crap! Quite so. Thanks.
Boy, am I rusty :-(
July 3rd, 2010 at 1:04 am
Here’s something interesting. The fault seems to fall within Webkit/Mail interaction, and it’s related to the Safari 5 update. I updated my work computer to Safari 5 before 10.6.4 came out, and it had this problem from the time of the update. At home, I did not get a chance to update to 5 until 10.6.4 came out (which included the update). I am not having this “black e-mail of death” problem at home.
July 3rd, 2010 at 5:43 am
I’ve had the exact same thing happen on a Windows XP3 box (yesterday, in fact and no safari in sight) so webkit might not be the sole cause; given the players involved when it happened to me, I suspect Adobe…
July 3rd, 2010 at 6:16 am
I have been experiencing the same issue, only with my email signature when using Pathfinder. When I choose a file to email from the contextual menu, the email that gets generated with the attachment has the black box around my email. The kicker here is, though, I’m running 10.5.8 on a G5. Safari 5 though.
July 3rd, 2010 at 9:34 am
@Tye — Yes, Safari 5 is the culprit, at least its WebKit implementation.
July 3rd, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Safari 5 update also corrupted my “To-Do” from Mail.app. When I choose “New To-DO” by right-clicking a message, I end up with an empty to-do.
If I create “to-do”s by selecting some text from the message first, it’s OK.
Anyone know a fix for this one?
July 4th, 2010 at 6:05 am
Having the same problem here when attaching Word docs to Mail from Word itself – the signature is buried in black. But the shift-command-t works for now…
July 6th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
[...] a bug in the current version of Mail and also affects other applications apart from DEVONthink. Read more about it here. We hope that Apple will fix it [...]
July 7th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
I haven’t seen this problem myself. I’m running the latest Webkit nightly, not just the stock Safari 5.
http://www.webkit.org
July 11th, 2010 at 9:47 am
Having the same problem with files and text added by the Attaché droplet. Thanks for the info Tim!