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Entourage is not showing me a message body?

I don't know what's going on, but every so often I get an email message in Microsoft Entourage that doesn't have any message body, even though the person who sent it insists that they included a message. Is there some overzealous spam filter in the way, or a virus, or what?


Dave's Answer:

If it's spam or it's produced by a virus-infected machine, it's quite possible that you could get email that's a header and an attachment (a .zip, a .exe, etc.) without any message body, so that's a possibility, but you might well have a spam filter that's monkeying with things too. I find that on my own configuration when I get a rich format email message that's only in "rich" format and it triggers my main spam filter, I can have a blank email message that actually reveals its treasures only when I "view source" in Entourage.

Here's an example I got today, actually. In Entourage, I see this:

Blank Message in Microsoft Entourage Mail for Mac OS X

And yet, I know that there's a message in there, even if I can't see it, because Jim, the sender, told me that there's an embedded link to the YouSendIt.Com service - it's a large audio file.

To prise the message content out, I choose View --> Source and see all the ugly mail headers [well, you probably see them as ugly. Me, I've been working with email for twenty years now so I understand 'em all and find that message headers are somewhat akin to a good detective novel. Not quite as good, but still interesting reading!] Scrolling down just a bit, past all the spam tests and warning messages, I get to:

Message View Source in Microsoft Entourage Mail for Mac OS X

... and there's that link I seek. Aha!

So it is there, Entourage just can't quite decipher the broken message structure from the spam filter. It happens. In my experience, it's a small price to pay for having a set of aggressive spam filters that protect me from the way too many junk messages I see flowing into my mailbox every day.

Hope that helps you out. I admit that it's a little bit of a tricky/geeky solution, but if you know that there's a body to the message but you can't see it, do try just using the "view source" feature and scrolling down to identify the relevant portion of the message.









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