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:

1. Click in the body of the Mail message
2. Press Command-A to select all
3. Press Command-X to cut
4. Press the Delete key to clear remaining elements
5. 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 }apple mail, safari, webkit, mail.app, apple mail bugs, ical, applescriptSimilar Posts:

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Frustrated by Mail’s tendency to freeze when he dragged anything onto Mail’s Dock icon, he went back and painstakingly restored his Mail installation step-by-step until the glitch re-emerged.

Here’s what he discovered (you can test it for yourself):

One: Set Mail’s New message default in the Composing preference pane to plain text.

Two: Add a signature to your email account in the Signatures Preference pane. Make sure that you select it at the bottom of the signature pane to be added to every new message by default:

Three: Drag an image or anything else onto Mail’s Dock icon.

That’s a big, 100%-repeatable train wreck for me.

It seems like a common configuration; it’s not restricted to dragging ClarisWorks documents onto the Dock icon when the signature contains a particular accented Laotian character. How does such a thing not emerge in internal testing? Perhaps I am too romantic about internal testing.

Anyway, happily, I am in the clear. All my signatures are just a few keystrokes away in TextExpander.

But Martin suggests some workarounds for those plagued by these freezes:

a) Use Rich Text (not an option if you use Blackberry or need plain text)
b) Use Plain Text but remove the signatures (can be a Pain In the A** if you use different business accounts like me with odd disclaimers that are a “must”).
c) Roll back to Safari 3.0.* and either use it or use Camino/Opera/Firefox/Etc. Could be a problem if you rely on Safari stuff like Inquisitor, 1Password, etc.
d) Don’t drag attachments to the dock icon…

On 8 April Apple acknowledged this as “a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering”. mail.app, apple mail, rich text, webkit?, plain text, dock, attachments, bug, signaturesSimilar Posts:

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The loophole allows a sender to disguise an executable file (say, a shell script) as an image or some other harmless file. When clicked on, the executable file runs. Don’t remember? See the Hawk Wings post at the time (Feb, 2006).

Now, it’s back. You can test for yourself. The Heise Security web site offers to send you a test email. Give them an email address and after a confirmation, the email arrives:

CLick on the “jpg” to open it, and it runs a shell script, listing your current directory and exiting harmelessly:

Last time, the news prompted a range of responses, some of them rather hysterical. One writer even claimed that it made Mail.app too dangerous to use.

I am happy to follow John Gruber’s lead (again). As he said last time:

“It boils down to this: you can’t safely double-click files from untrusted sources, and you never could. This is no different today on Mac OS X 10.4 than it was a decade ago on Mac OS 8 and 9.”

Puzzling that it’s back, yes. But dangerous? No more than usual.

UPDATE: “FatYank” provides a quick fix in the comments for those who are really worried about this:

The workaround for this is to rename Terminal. When you rename Terminal and double click on the JPG, you get a message stating that Preview cannot open the file.

Or, as Rob points out, you could use Quickview to view attachments first, in which these “fake” file show up as empty.

Thanks!

[Via The Register ]mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, security, shell script, bug, apple, tiger mail, exploitSimilar Posts:

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Dylan Muir finds that when he views large attachments stored on his IMAP server in Mail.app, they are corrupted. If he views them in a webmail client, they aren’t. If he views them in Thunderbird, they aren’t. It’s only Mail.app.

Unusually, the Apple Mail gods on the Discussion Boards seem to be out of ideas.

I wonder if anyone here has experienced this too (I never have), and knows what’s going on.mai.app, apple mail, attachments, imap, corruption, bugSimilar Posts:

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The problem is this: If you use Shift-Arrow keys to select multiple messages in the Mail’s Message Viewer, hitting Shift-Up to deselect a message highlighted by mistake doesn’t deselect it. It selects the message immediately above the top selected email instead.

Try it. I had never even attempted this before, so it was news to me.

The fault is caused (I learn from John’s post) by the default list controls in Data Browser (Carbon apps like Finder and iTunes) and in NSTableView (Cocoa apps).

Jim Speth has written a plugin for Mail.app that makes the Shift-Arrow key combination behave as many believe it should.

If ⌘-Clicking the offending item selected by mistake doesn’t satisfy, this may be solution for you.

LiveJournal blogger Nevyn has taken the fix a step further by turning the plugin into an Input Manager that will correct the behaviour in all Cocoa apps. One small hitch; it crashes the Adium 1.0 beta.

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Recently at my real work but not at home, Mail has been hanging for 30 seconds to a minute each time I tried to reply to an email. I would hit the Reply button and have time to make a cup of coffee in the kitchenette before the reply window appeared.

Luckily, the network administrator at the College, Tim Bell, has god-like tcpdump powers. He uncovered what was happening.

Each time I reply to a message, Mail attempts to contact an Apple server through port 80. That’s not a problem at home, but it is at work, where port 80 is blocked and a proxy redirects all HTTP traffic through another port. Mail didn’t respect my proxy settings. It carried on regardless with a process that eventually failed after lengthy delay.

Tim opened the port so that we could see what Mail was trying to do.

Mail was sending the following request based on my .Mac username to certinfo.mac.com (17.250.248.148):

GET /lookup?timgaden HTTP/1.1

In response, it was getting:

The third line in base64 decodes to G\x92\x06\x1777V\xd6W2 (where \x?? means the non-ascii character 92 (in hex), etc.) – so Tim tells me – and the fourth line to acceptance (with a trailing space).

Once we understood the problem, we could google for an answer. It turns out that Jonathan Wight experienced the same thing a year ago. He also provides a fix: delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.plist preferences file.

I’m not suggesting that anything nefarious or underhand is happening here, but it still puzzles me on three fronts.

First, what exactly is it checking and what is the undecipherable response? Is it checking my iChat certificate?

Secondly, why should Mail try to do this when I am replying to a message in my work account on my work server?

Thirdly, why is Mail so stupid? What design oversight makes it overlook my system-wide proxy settings and carry on banging away at port 80, giving me endless delays? Normally, Mail.app helps me to get things done, but not here.

UPDATE: MacGeekery has posted an interesting take on this, which is worth a read.

I hope I made it clear in my post above – although perhaps I didn’t – that I do not think Apple is stealing my credit card information or looking for cracked software or turning my computer into a drone for Apple press releases or doing anything else untoward.

I do think it is puzzling that my proxy settings were ignored and that Mail.app was thus unusable for up to a minute everytime I tried to reply to a message. I do think it is puzzling that the fix was so hard to find. I do think it is fair to expect better of Apple than this.

[Thanks for your help this afternoon, Tim. All my tcpdump are belong to you.]mail.app, apple mail, security, certificates, port 80, reply, hanging, spinning beachball of death, bug, proxySimilar Posts:

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If you change the orientation of a photo in iPhoto and then try to email it by sending the image to Mail.app, the orientation change gets lost.

It only happens the first time you try it though. If you kill the email and try again from iPhoto everything is fine. Odd. Similar Posts:

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This well-documented event (you can see the log report complete with moth sticky-taped to it here) is often thought to be the origin of the terms, “bug” and “debug“, in reference to computer problems, something even Mail.app suffers from time to time.

But it’s not true.

According to Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Language Myths (Penguin, 2005), this use of bug is much older.

He cites a report in the Pall Mall Gazette from 1889 about the inventor Thomas Edison:

Mr Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering a ‘bug’ in his phonograph — an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.

And he suggests that it might be even older. An electrical handbook published in 1896 mentions that the term was first used jokingly by telegraph operators to explain that noisy lines were caused by insects invading the telegraph wires.

The legacy of nineteenth century proto-phone-phreakers?

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It’s easy to see how this happens with Apple Mail. At least David Duff posting on MacInTouch has an answer:

Other posters correctly point out problems with sending url’s in mail…when sending, Mail.app uses a “Content-Type: text/plain;” with the option “format=flowed”, which seems to be fairly standard. It also uses the option “delsp=yes”. the semantics of the delsp option are that if delsp=yes, then the space at the end of the line should be removed when the lines are joined together into paragraphs.

When doing “normal” line wrapping between words, where the space should be present, Mail.app ends the line with two spaces. When wrapping a line with a URL, where the space should not be present, Mail.app uses a single space. Thus, it should be possible, in theory, to correctly reconstruct the URL.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. At least not when sending mail among the most popular two mail clients on the Mac platform (namely Mail.app and Microsoft entourage). the problem may be that the delsp option is a fairly new (added between RFC2646 and RFC3676) and not yet widely adopted.

That’s the explanation, but what’s the solution? Sometimes Apple can be too innovative, and here is a perfect example! While we are waiting around for the rest of the internet to catch up to the delsp option, there must be a way to fix this? Anyone know? Do you?broken hyperlinks, URLs, bug, delsp=yes, mail.app, apple mail, line wrapping, annoyanceSimilar Posts:

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