OT - Attack of the As? Mail is showing As instead of E-mail content?

Hi all:

Apologies for the off topic subject but just in the past few days, most of the e-mails I am receiving are showing up as full of little As, some inside boxes, some just lines of As. It seems that they are mostly showing up instead of signatures, graphics, etc. Very strange. I use Mail and I can send and receive my own e-mails with graphics attached and they show up fine. I mailed myself an e-mail with a graphic attached.

Tried deleting Mail prefs (com.apple.mail.plist) but unfortunately that is where Apple also keeps your mailboxes so I couldn't delete the .plist without losing all of my mailboxes and e-mails.

Has anyone experienced this weirdness and if so, how did you fix it? It is really obnoxious not being able to see half of the content of your e-mails. Some logos show up but most seem to be getting turned into As as well as a lot of content.

Thanks,

Dan Brockett

Dan,
I had the same problem a while back and found Little Snitch to be the culprit. If you are using Little Snitch, check for a rule under Mail that blocks ports 80 & 443.

Does this behavior happen if you sign in with another User? Preferably Guest or a Brand New User. Also does this behavior happen with all emails or just a select number of emails? Think common things, Same Mail account, Same Sender, ect.

Tony

Hi Greaser:

I've never even heard of Little Snitch and don't know what it is, so I doubt it could be that.

I only have one User on this laptop but I will create another account and will check that out. It seems to be happening with all e-mails that have any sort of footer, signature or graphics. If you just e-mail straight text, no problem but anything else turns into random groups of As or As in little square boxes. Very strange.

Thanks for the advice, I'll let you know what signing in under another account does.

Dan

Can you post a screenshot?

--
Christoph Vonrhein
[www.chv-plugins.com]

Hi Christoph:

Here are a few.
[gallery.me.com]

Dan

Dan,

At first glance, it seems like you may have a font encoding issue, or a bad font cache file.

This utility will help with font cache files: FontNuke.

Since the message you've provided appears to be some sort of HTML-ized e-mail message, there could be other things going on. I'd suggest you try FontNuke and see if it helps.


-Dave

P.S. - In Mac OS X, corrupt font cache files can really destabilize the operating system or cause applications to crash. In Mac OS 9 (and earlier), font files were "loaded" into the system and could become corrupt themselves, but in Mac OS X fonts are put into cache files when they are "loaded" for use. One symptom of a flakey/corrupt font cache in OS X is the appearance of weird-looking characters in a block of text.

Hi Dave:

Downloaded FontNuke and ran it. It found 16 font cache files and deleted them all, then re-started. Unfortunately, it did not do anything with the font problem. On an off chance (because I mainly use FireFox), I booted up Safari and I am seeing the font issue on several areas of my start page, www.nytimes.com 90% of the page displays correctly but in certain small areas, I am getting the As in the boxes. This would seem to indicate to me that this is definitely a font issue, not a Mail issue.

When I load the same www.nytimes.com front page in FireFox, I am not getting the As in the boxes, but the front page doesn't load correctly, there are large portions of it that are just not showing up with large white areas where there would normally be text or those obnoxious Flash advertisements that are up at the top near the masthead.

I am perplexed, this is not good.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Dan

Dave:

You had the right idea. Another user over at Creative Cow also suggested the same idea, corrupt font cache. He suggested trying OnyX so I did and it solved the issue. Not sure why FontNuke wouldn't fix it and OnyX did but I am glad that something fixed it.

www.nytimes.com front page still will not display correctly on my current version of FireFox 3.6.12, there are huge gaps of white all over, but it does now display correctly in Safari so that points to a FireFox issue? Thanks for your help and advice, I really appreciate it. Now, back to editing, on a deadline for this project.

Cheers,

Dan Brockett

Dan Brockett Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Dave:
>
> You had the right idea. Another user over at
> Creative Cow also suggested the same idea, corrupt
> font cache. He suggested trying OnyX so I did and
> it solved the issue. Not sure why FontNuke
> wouldn't fix it and OnyX did but I am glad that
> something fixed it.
>
> www.nytimes.com front page still will not display
> correctly on my current version of FireFox 3.6.12,
> there are huge gaps of white all over, but it does
> now display correctly in Safari so that points to
> a FireFox issue? Thanks for your help and advice,
> I really appreciate it. Now, back to editing, on a
> deadline for this project.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dan Brockett

I'm glad it worked, at least somewhat...

It still may be a font issue. Perhaps, two or more copies of the same font, or even two versions of the same font (TrueType and OpenType, or maybe even PostScript). It may be that one of the browsers is handling the fonts differently than the other. You'd have to look at the page source to further investigate this issue.

If the issue involves multiple copies of the same font, or multiple versions/formats, then a font manager application may help. I use FontExplorer X, but it isn't free. Apple's Font Book works pretty well, but it's like using iMovie versus FCP.

Of course, leave further study of this issue until you've done your real work... good luck...


-Dave