Receiving email with a yellow banner "This message can only be displayed as plain text"

[davidbohl]

Firstly this is a new problem, for years I have been receiving emails from the same source that contain highlighted text, bold etc.

No this, any clues please?

[用心棒]

Is this issue occurring in Virgin Media Mail (webmail) or an email client; if latter which?

Can you post a redacted screenshot of the issue?

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[davidbohl]

Just in Virgin Media Mail, I can copy text into Outlook and GMail no problem

[Ashleigh_C]

Hi there @davidbohl 

Thank you so much for your post and welcome to the community forums, it's great to have you here. 

I am so sorry that you are facing an issue with your email, can I ask if the email you are sending is just standard text or are there any links or images included?

[davidbohl]

Hi, the problem is in receiving emails not sending

The email can be received correctly in Gmail and Outlook with the correct formatted standard text, with bold and highlighted text. It has no embedded links but does have attachments

thanks

[John_GS]

Hi @davidbohl 

I've ran a check on this and why you'd receive that notification. It says this;

Check the email source formatting as if the senders email client is set to send emails in plain text the recipient will receive them in plain text.

Best wishes.

[用心棒]

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@davidbohl wrote:

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The email can be received correctly in Gmail and Outlook with the correct formatted standard text, with bold and highlighted text. It has no embedded links but does have attachments
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It is going to be difficult to deduce the cause of this issue without an example email to observe. Is the email message causing this issue coming from a publicly accessible source, i.e. mailing list or similar?

[coenoby]

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@davidbohl wrote:

I have been receiving emails from the same source that contain highlighted text, bold etc.

any clues please?

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The fact the affected emails all come from the same source is a big clue I think.

Have you gone back them to say that their HTML emails are not bring rendered byVM webmail?  I would think that would be grateful for that feedback because obviously they want their emails to be seen in full by all their contacts.

HTML emails are always a potential problem because email providers and email apps do not necessarily render HTML in the same way. It's true that usually results in the contents of an HTML email being displayed differently when viewed on different email clients rather than the "can only display plain text" error message you are seeing in VM webmail. Have you compared how these emails are being displayed in Gmail and Outlook? If so, are there any differences in how the emails are displayed in the two clients?

I have tested sending a number of HTML emails to my VM email account that I receive from a variety of sources. All of them seem to be displayed fine.

As @用心棒 has said, it really needs an example email, if that is possible, to take things further, However, I do think it would be worth contacting the sender if you can. It is possible it is not just VM webmail that has problems rendering these emails correctly.

Coenoby

[Client62]

Could it be the sender has switched from sending in HTML to RTF ?

[coenoby]

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@Client62 wrote:

Could it be the sender has switched from sending in HTML to RTF ?

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Good thought but no, I don't think so,

I did try sending an RTF formatted email from a non VM email account using Outlook to my VM email account and VM webmail displays the emboldening and italics fine.

Coenoby