Apple mail strips text when displaying an incoming email

Question

I receive emails associated with a club I belong to from an email reflector. Club members send emails to the reflector and the reflector resends the email to each club member including me of course
This works fine so long as the email to (and from) the reflector contains either only text or only an attachment (as in a photograph). However if the distributed email contains both text and a photo Apple Mail is unwilling to display the text ... only the photograph appears. Which as you might well imagine is rather annoying.
So how do I know that the email is displayed with the accompanying text stripped away? Well if I look at the raw source (View --> Message --> Raw Source) I see the following:
--001a11c249488ce20604f4d3bcb6
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11c249488ce20304f4d3bcb5
--001a11c249488ce20304f4d3bcb5
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
This morning I attended a funeral for a friend ... blah blah blah.
[image: Inline image 1]
--001a11c249488ce20304f4d3bcb5
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<div dir=3D"ltr">This morning I attended a funeral for a friend ... blah blah blah.<div>
<br>><div><br></div><div><img src=3D"cid:ii_144d1d783f1e7a=
84" alt=3D"Inline image 1" width=3D"446" height=3D"334"><br></div></div></d=
iv>
--001a11c249488ce20304f4d3bcb5--
--001a11c249488ce20604f4d3bcb6
Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="IMG_0918.JPG"
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="IMG_0918.JPG"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-ID: <ii_144d1d783f1e7a84>
X-Attachment-Id: ii_144d1d783f1e7a84
/9j/4R/+RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAAKAA4BAgAgAAAAhgAAAA8BAgAGAAAApgAAABABAgAZAAAArAAA
ABIBAwABAAAAAQAAABoBBQABAAAAzAAAABsBBQABAAAA1AAAACgBAwABAAAAAgAAADIBAgAUAAAA
3AAAABMCAwABAAAAAgAAAGmHBAABAAAA8AAAAAINAAAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAgICAg
I changed the text to protect the identify of the sender. In Apple Mail all I see is the picture (IMG_0918.JPG) and all the text that goes with it is missing.
From what I can tell from comments on the reflector, some other email clients exhibit the same problem (they also strip the text) while others do not. So maybe the email is not being formatting properly by the reflector. That could be. But files on the web have mal-formed HTML all the time, yet browsers deal with the mal-formed HTML without stripping the text away as seems to be the case here.
It seems to be that Apple Mail sould be able to display the text which in contained in the raw source.
Any solution (other that looking at these email in raw source to read thei missing textual contentt)? If an Apple employee is reading this maybe you could pass this along to whoever is prosponsible for keeping track of Apple Mail bugs.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I design and code a lot of HTML emails, and plain text remains an important feature for many clients.
This seems to be a recent change to Mac Mail. Previously, there was an option under View --> Message to show the plain text alternative.
See this link: http://help.campaignmonitor.com/topic.aspx?t=96