Alright, with respect to everyone involved in the project, those with this same problem, and those interested in what the resolution will one day be... I must ask... Is there some way to get this elevated to a real issue that the developers might hopefully release a hotfix for in the very near future?

If messages are showing in the message list, but when you click on them the content does not appear in the reading pane, then a likely cause is that the folder index has become corrupted. Try repairing the folder. Note that this problem is more likely to occur when the folder contains a large number of messages. Good practice is to keep the Inbox almost empty.

Alas, rebuilding the index did not help. We are still getting e-mails that have nothing in the body, but do have a jpg attached to them.

I am still trying to comprehend why we have to read these "blank" e-mails on our android cellular phone with the gmail app instead of being able to use the Thunderbird e-mail program on our Windows 10 desktop PC.

With respect, amanchesterman, if there is data in these e-mails in the android gmail app, then why can't Thunderbird display the same data?

I use to be in IT when I was much younger, about 20 years ago, and using my archaic knowledge, this issue simply is not logical. If there is data in said e-mail, then the data should be displayed by any program designed to fetch, send and display data contained with e-mails.

With respect to you, amanchesterman, and the developers of Thunderbird, I honestly believe that this is a very rare bug in the Thunderbird program and I, unfortunately, do not have any way to fix this bug. I can only cause it to manifest.

Just a wild theory, but it is possible that you display the message as plain text (in contrast to HTML)? Some clients do not generate plain text variants of the message text (and send an empty text block instead). You can easily verify whether that's the case by switching to HTML (beware of security risks!) via View|Message Body As|Simple HTML.

Thank you again, Dirk. But unfortunately, we had already thought of that idea. All of our computers are set to display simplified HTML.

Wolverine79936 schrieb

Thank you again, Dirk. But unfortunately, we had already thought of that idea. All of our computers are set to display simplified HTML.

Hm, worth a shot. Did you look into the source code of the email? Are all headers present? Any content?

Are you able to view the source of the problem message(s) in Thunderbird and confirm that they have the missing message content? Open the message in its own tab, then press Ctrl+u to call up a source view.

I suspect Thunderbird might share a problem with Firefox that "deeply nested" elements in the HTML are either disregarded or displayed as a lump of plain text. Such structures can be created by repeatedly editing and especially copy/pasting into an email over and over (e.g., for a weekly newsletter). Or forwarding and re-forwarding with indenting.

For example (in Firefox on webmail):

• https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1126806
• https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1051410

Interesting, jscher... It's there and there are no tags around the body. Just a single line of text which is exactly what shows up on the phone. Too bad it still doesn't show up in thunderbird. :(

With regards to "just display any data" rather than nothing, anyone with some technical skills should be able to understand that this is comparable to what IE did for web pages not always honoring standards whereas Firefox displayed nothing. Not to start a discussion about that, but maybe you understand that technically it doesn't always makes sense to display stuff that might even look like garbage, simply because of the way Thunderbird handles data, which could even be related to safety issues.

As for rebuilding the index: in case you did this by clicking Properties and choosing "Repair folder", you could also try doing so by closing Thunderbird, browing the profile folder/file structure and deleting any file ending with .msf for the profile involved.

Another thing you could do is browse to your C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Thunderbird\Profiles\ folder (NOT the real profile folder that contains Roaming instead of Local) and delete everything associated to the same profile name's folder. Chances are some unwanted things are cached there, interfering proper functioning. To be safe, back the contents up first, but they should simply be regenerated.

There have also been reports of one message with some "strange" content causing others not to display properly, so removing any unwanted or suspicious ones from the Inbox may help. (Comparable to keeping the Inbox almost empty.) Moving existing messages to older folders (temporarily or not) therefore may also help finding it.

And of course, are you using any add-ons on the affected machine and therefore did you try starting Thunderbird in Safe mode (=Restart with add-ons disabled, in Help menu, or when pressing Shift during startup), or disable any add-ons manually? (First step)