Mail Program does not display the content of some AOL emails

Question

I have an AOL email address but access my email account through the Mail program (ver 2.1). I am using both a Powerbook G4 and an iMac G5 (OSX 10.4.8) and have the same problem with both machines. When I try to read many (approx. a fifth) of my emails in Mail, I get the following (or something similar):
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------040506000506030104030008"
If I log on to the AOL server directly, I can read the email or download the attachment. Any way to fix this problem short of ditching AOL?

Answer 1

I have exactly the same problem, except the frequency of occurrence is much lower -- maybe one in 50 to 100 emails delivered from my AOL account does this. I don't know the root cause or if the app or the server is at fault, but the immediate cause is Mail either doesn't receive or doesn't properly process the message's headers, including the MIME 'boundary' declaration necessary to convert the raw message stream into its multiple parts, so it treats the whole thing as one long plain text message.
Standard fixes like rebuilding the mailbox or reindexing have no effect since the flaw is carried into the emlx file that stores the message. In some cases, I have been able to edit the file with a text editor to preserve some message part(s), but this is not something you should try without knowledge of MIME standards or emlx file structure.